QA #8: How do I get buy-in from my boss / team / client for my UX/UI design ideas?

Published March 7, 2022

If you would like to present your reasoning clearly and confidently so that stakeholders easily understand the thought behind your work, are able to provide specific feedback, and get behind your solutions, come prepared with a shortlist of “design principles”.

These principles are 2 to 5 clear and concise sentences that explain the WHY and HOW behind your work so that people won’t shred apart your design because they didn’t understand the approach behind it.

Presenting your design principles will not only remove subjectivity from feedback and help stakeholders focus their critique, but the extra time that gets put into thinking clearly about the how and why makes it so much easier to talk about if it gets questioned.

Recently, we re-designed a checkout page for a well-known SaaS company. From our research, we learned that the page was not performing well because of the way the information was structured.

After I created a first draft solution, I wrote these simple principles:

Add clarity: we want users to scan and quickly understand their plan, the price and their amount due today. Reduce friction: we want users to quickly hit the upgrade button and effortlessly enter their card details. Make it easy to find the customization controls: those that do need to customize should be able to find the inputs easily. Consider what users aren’t seeing on the pricing page: this may be their first time encountering the structure of their plan since those things are not obvious on the pricing page.

Writing design principles keeps the important goals of your work front and center. When successfully outlined, you’ll be ready to confidently present and you’ll be less likely to get caught off guard when questioned.