As you accumulate design mileage, you become increasingly aware that our glorious leaders make emotional decisions with only occasional spasms of logic. At the highest office, emotion dominates while logic plays with lettered blocks in the basement.

Quick tweak that improves UX? No thanks. Shiny new toy completely unrelated to the business? Ready the treasury. Man the torpedos. All systems red alert.

How do we influence these decisions when the corpo electoral college decides what lives and dies? We become politicians.

The greatest bill ever devised means nothing if it is not signed into law. Careful and effective campaigning are what decide initial success. For our purposes, this boils down to communication with stakeholders — the dreaded lip flapping and hand slapping that governs our workdays.

For your next election cycle, I lay these strategies at your feet.

Grassroots campaigning

When you disagree with the direction of a project, your best hope to influence a stakeholder away is to provide what they asked for and what you believe are better alternatives. This is a "Yes, and" approach.

If you fight it up-front, you'll still have to make it but now your social credit score is diminished.

Marketing your bill

Context is non-negotiable when requesting feedback. Too many times I see designers posting plain links or giving real-estate tours.

When sharing designs, you need to tell stakeholders why they're seeing what they are, not what it is. Presumably they have eyes — they can see.

User feedback influenced major aspects? Make an anecdote. Slight departure from the original brief? Give some background as to why. Criteria unclear? Mention what you went off of and what still needs to be clarified.

Approach from the flank

The fastest way from point A to B is a straight line. That does not make it the most effective.

Directly refuting a stakeholder's idea is a great way to take a lean on your house. If you aim to keep your mortgage paid and have the slimmest chance of achieving your desired result, your best bet will be to lead stakeholders through your thinking with deferential language.

Phrases like "I think", "It might", "I'm unsure about", "We could try" are powerful as they are non-confrontational. Confrontation means resistance. Resistance means defensive. Defensive means no.

Will this make you sound like a punk-ass? Almost definitely. Is it borderline manipulative? Probably, but we're politicians now.

The decision is theirs whether you like it or not but by reinforcing this in our communique we remain in a neutral-to-positive position even if there is disagreement.

No filibuster

Brevity is your best friend when communicating with stakeholders. You must accomplish all the points above while remaining succinct. The better your word economy, the more likely a stakeholder will actually remain attentive.

If you're giving a speech about a button color, you're fucked.

A new beginning. A waste of time and money. The inane ramblings of someone with too much to say and too few places to say it. This could be any and all of these things, in time.

Whether this is a blog, a journal, or screams into the void I do not know. Regardless, it will be about design. Product design. UX design. UI design. Whatever the fuck we call it these days.

Entry length will range from "very short" to "holy shit I'm not reading that". Grammar will be decent but questionable. Metaphors will be bizarre.

My hope is that designers stumble across this and find it entertaining — maybe even useful. Finding solace in their fellow man persevering through the scars of the design process — failure, success, and everything in between.

Ultimately, this is about the hills we die on.