Hello everybody.
Emily, a member of our Slack Community (you should join if you haven’t already), asked a great question recently. It basically boiled down to this:
I have a stakeholder who is ignoring my advice and making bad decisions. How do I steer them away from making a mistake?
In this case, the stakeholder was a client who was making poor design choices, but it is a scenario that occurs frequently in different formats. Someone wants to make a bad choice, and you are struggling to save them from themselves.
Sometimes you cannot save people from themselves.
Unfortunately, sometimes there is literally nothing you can do. People make bad decisions, and there is no stopping them. No matter how much you try, you can’t stop people from sticking beans up their nose, as Jared Spool puts it.
That said, I don’t like admitting defeat. In fact, over the years, I seem to have specialized in stopping people from sticking beans up their nose.
So, with that in mind, I thought I would share the advice I gave Emily.
Emily was struggling with a client who was compromising the readability of their website by requesting small font sizes. Emily tried to make arguments around accessibility and legibility but the client wouldn’t listen.
The reason for this failure was that most stakeholders don’t care about the things we do. They don’t care about design, legibility, typography, or even accessibility.
Find out what people care about
However, they do care about something. You just need to find out what that something is and then demonstrate how their bad decision will negatively impact that thing.
For example, in Emily’s case, the client probably cares about the number of people who take action on their website. So all we need to do is show how font size impacts conversion.
Make a case based on your stakeholders prioritize
This is where Chat GPT or Bing Chat is invaluable. All you need to do is ask something like:
Give me some statistics about the negative impacts of small font sizes on website conversion.
It responded with:
Various research shows that small font sizes and low contrast are the number one complaint for web users as it relates to reading online. Due to the effects of aging, at 40, only half the light gets through to your retina as it did at age 20. There have been several studies that show the effect of font sizes on people’s reading ability and the likelihood they will convert.
Both of the articles cited directly make the connection between font size and conversion. It does all of the hard work for you to find relevant material to make the connection you are looking for.
Then, it is just a matter of sharing this with the client and saying something along the lines of:
I am happy to reduce the font size if that is what you personally want, as long as you are aware that it could easily have a negative impact on the number of people who act on your website. Are you happy with that risk, or would you prefer to run a simple test to compare my design with your choices?
People never like to be seen as taking risks, so the chances are they will opt for testing. That gives you the opportunity to definitively prove that their choice will be damaging.
If they opt for implementing their chosen approach anyway, then your ultimate fallback is to ask for something in writing. I normally go for something like:
I appreciate your approach, and I am willing to implement it. It is your project, after all. However, I would request a small favor. Could you please send me a brief email confirming that I have expressed my concerns about this approach? It is important for me to maintain a clear record and avoid any potential accountability for a decline in the conversion rate in the future.
Again, nobody likes to take responsibility, and they will try their hardest to persuade you that it is a good idea. Remain positive and say you are more than willing to implement whatever they think is best, but you cannot agree with them. Often that is enough to turn them around.
Of course, ultimately, there is no magic approach that will stop people from making a bad decision. Sometimes you might need to admit defeat gracefully, as I said in a recent post about constraints on Smashing Magazine, and simply implement what they have asked for. However, we can at least try, and using approaches like the ones above, I see a pretty high success rate. After all, despite what we may sometimes feel, most people are pretty reasonable.
