Wk 6: How to avoid the design revision death spiral

Challenges:

The revision death spiral
Subsequent meetings where the client decides that the currently chosen path should be scrapped in favor of a previously abandoned path. If every meeting involves re-considering first assumptions or second-guessing previous decisions, it is impossible to move forward.

Unfocused and unspecific feedback
Many clients have had a hard time focusing on the appropriate level of detail—early in the project they want to discuss the intricacies of one small widget when the design team is trying to come to resolution about the overall interaction framework.

Preconceptions and prejudgments
Without any research to suggest that this functionality satisfies an observed user need, that's a potentially harmful preconception; it can impede progress on designs of functionality that does support user needs and goals. Compromise does not always lead to the best solution

Compromise does not always lead to the best solution
Compromises can undermine this conceptual integrity, reducing the effectiveness of the solution.

No accounting for taste
Client feedback is based upon personal taste, rather than an assessment of the design's potential satisfaction of user and business goals.

Solution:

Manage your communications
When designers were too tired, they walk out leaving the valuable work on the whiteboard. One interaction designer and one design communicator. Where the interaction designer is ultimately responsible for the conceptual integrity and visual renderings of the design solution, the design communicator's primary responsibility is to ensure that our solutions and ideas are clearly communicated among design team members and to our clients.

Get the right people in the room
We attempt to maintain a balance between small design teams and larger cross-functional teams. Initial ideation and framework design is very difficult to do in a large group—this is where conceptual integrity is critical, and while some divergent thinking is crucial for creativity, large groups tend to be uncontrollably divergent, making it impossible to establish momentum or direction.
We are also somewhat hesitant to perform initial design framework development with clients because we've run into situations where very senior client representatives grow quite attached to initial brainstorm ideas that subsequently turned out not to be satisfactory solutions

Collaborate early and often
We should involve our clients as soon as we have something that is substantially coherent. The benefits here are twofold: we have more time to accommodate the feedback, and clients become more committed to solutions that they have been involved in developing, thereby reducing the chance of getting torpedoed at a major milestone check-in.

Use personas and scenarios to provide context
When it comes to client feedback and collaboration, personas help us maintain the proper context for assessing the fitness of a solution. Rather than relying on personal taste or aesthetic judgment, we are able to assess a design on the basis of whether it helps a user achieve her goals, and whether she would find the experience pleasurable or compelling. We typically introduce a design solution by describing a persona going through a scenario where she uses the product to accomplish something.

Develop visual renderings in progressive detail
There's really nothing more frustrating than showing a client what is intended to be a rough sketch of the big picture and having him or her get hung up on the visual style or a specific icon. For this reason, as our design process starts at the big picture and works inwards to define more and more detail, we are very sparing with detail in our high-level sketches

Reference Link:
http://www.cooper.com/content/insights/newsletters/2005_issue02/Early_and_often.asp