Control your vertigo — the unspoken rule for defending design decisions | by Rita Kind-Envy

How to keep UX maturity when discussing something that you stand for, and not slam the door after another useless meeting.

A group of 8–10 people (most of them are men who have never taken any communication classes) is locked in a room for 3 hours. AC is working, but it’s getting hot nonetheless. An argument seems inevitable.

On a projector is a concept my content design team developed.

Let’s take a real-life example. The website’s Arabian localization is not displayed correctly. It’s set up to read from left to right, but it needs to be the opposite to match how Arabic is read. We’re sure that we need to adjust the website’s layout to mirror this properly.

We think that:

• these changes are vital and must have priority
• the current interface is plain disrespectful

Surprisingly, there are people who oppose this.

They are quick to dismiss the changes as too expensive — which is far from the truth — and they’re pushing their own ideas. Ideas that, honestly, not only look terrible but also threaten to undo everything we’ve worked so hard to achieve. Locked in a room with morons — a Sartre-like nightmare.

At the end of a meeting, everyone is convinced their idea is still best, and the other guys are just idiots. Each fixated on the other’s words, determined not to resolve the argument but to win it.

Another useless meeting where no good decisions were made. Useless meetings waste time and $100 million a year for big companies.

In a high-stress, “high load” environment — where decisions are made in haste and politeness is thrown out the window — I quickly realized something:

I was armed with the belief that data is the best way to convince someone. That turned out to be false.

Everyone has brought their own data to the meeting: user feedback, UX studies, budget numbers, development estimation, and design elements that are to be re-used in the UI.