Q&A with Justyna Belkevic

Justyna Belkevic at UXDX Community: Ireland & UK. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4GGLzyPs64

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Understanding why stakeholders challenge

[00:00:00] Rory: ...who gave a talk on "Don't kill the messenger: how to deliver successful research readouts." So welcome, Justyna.

[00:00:08] Justyna: Hi everyone, it's nice to be here.

[00:00:11] Rory: Great. Oh, are you actually in an office?

[00:00:13] Justyna: Oh no, it is a house. No, it's my room.

[00:00:14] Rory: Oh okay. It's a lot more plants than I have in my life.

[00:00:22] Justyna: I love plants. I think a lot of people, especially during the pandemic, fell in love with plants, and yes, I'm one of them.

[00:00:29] Rory: I thought that looks very nice. Just in terms of your talk, one of the things that I really liked, and I had this experience as well, was that nobody really challenges just for the sake of challenging. They have a background reason, and they might not tell you what it is, but they have a reason, and you need to get to their underlying motives, or otherwise you're not going to get through why they're objecting. I found that very useful.

[00:00:58] Justyna: Absolutely. I think as UX designers we think that our primary goal is to understand the users, but it's also good to use the same techniques on our clients or stakeholders and dwell deeper and understand where they are coming from, what their goals are, especially around the user research readouts, user testing and the whole project. I think the more we know about clients and stakeholders, as much as we know about our users, the easier it's going to be to craft this message, to find this middle ground between those two groups.

[00:01:38] Rory: Yeah, as I think was said earlier, it's human-centric design, because it's not just purely the users, it's also the stakeholders.

[00:01:44] Justyna: Exactly.

Dealing with a nervous Nancy

[00:01:46] Rory: Let's make it real. Can you give us an example of a particular issue a nervous Nancy, say, raised, and how you dealt with that?

[00:01:57] Justyna: Absolutely. I had a couple of nervous Nancies in my career, and I think with experience you can already see who might be this nervous Nancy in your stakeholder group or in the client group. For example, I had a situation where, even before having the research readout, one of the nervous Nancies was telling me, "You know what, Justyna, UX research is all good and fun, but let's just not do it. You are a designer, aren't you? Can you just please build a product?" And you're thinking, okay, that's quite a big challenge.

[00:02:40] I could be telling the nervous Nancy all the good reasons why we should do the user research, what the benefit is and stuff like that. But the first thing that I wanted to discover is why the sudden change of importance. Why were we discussing doing the user research in the first place, and now it's 180 degrees of a change? So I had a sit-down with the nervous Nancy and said, "Look, we have changed our priorities. What's happening? Maybe I can help, maybe the team can help."

[00:03:16] And the nervous Nancy said that she had a lot of pressure from the board to show some results. She was doing this UX project for the first time, and she just thought, why waste, let's say, four weeks on the user research when we can just build it straight away? That is where she was coming from. As you have just mentioned from my presentation, nobody challenges without a reason, and without having this conversation I would not even be able to understand where she's coming from. I could just see her as a challenging stakeholder and have a very different approach.

[00:03:54] But once you sit down and discover that's the issue, then you can always find, well, I hope, the middle ground. For example, I shortened the research to two weeks instead of four weeks, and we managed to show these results to the board. There are also so many different examples during the presentation when you think that you're presenting one challenge, and you're talking about one challenge, like this dog, but then you open the floor for questions, and from the first questions that come to you, you realize that the stakeholders have misunderstood it, or they have their own idea of what we just discussed, what the challenge is.

[00:04:36] So if you follow those steps that I have shared, even before presenting the research readout, you're going to minimize those conversations during the research readouts where you discover that you're not on the same page, you're not talking about the same dog or about the same challenge.

When a stakeholder won't engage

[00:04:53] Rory: Great. I'm going to throw in one, because I've personally experienced this. I loved your approach and your technique, but what about the case where the stakeholder just won't engage? I've had a situation where I can't do the one-on-ones because they just won't meet with me. I can't try to get to their underlying needs, and they're dismissive of the approach. Have you any experiences with that, and how do you deal with that?

[00:05:22] Justyna: Yeah, unfortunately I also had those experiences in my life, and what I've learned from those is not to take it personally. It's not that you as Rory or me as Justyna is being challenged as a person; there's something else. In those kinds of situations, when I see that no matter what I say, no matter how much preparation I have before presenting the research readout, they don't want me to say that, or they don't want me to present it, then of course this identity crisis as a UX designer might happen. You might ask yourself, "Wow, am I betraying myself as a designer if I'm not going to say it, or if I say it differently, how the stakeholders want?"

[00:06:05] Sometimes it is worth losing one little battle to win the war. I had those conversations where, I remember, in the beginning of the project the stakeholders were just not having it. They had their favorite people that they trusted present some things, and me, a newcomer, saying, "I'm going to create this great research and you're going to love it," showing the challenges that they might not be prepared to hear. They were not allowing me to even talk about it.

[00:06:35] And then taking this whole journey of, let's say, six months of building this trust, building this relationship, and only after the sixth month for them to say, "We just want Justyna to present it. We trust her now." It's okay to understand in the beginning that sometimes you just need to lose the battle to win this bigger war, to build this trust. It takes time. Not every stakeholder has the same mindset as you, and that's also absolutely okay. Sometimes it just takes a lot of patience, a lot of self-work, and understanding that it's hopefully not that much about you. It's just a different person, I would say, and it takes time to build this relationship and trust.

Involving stakeholders in the output

[00:07:17] Rory: Yeah, and I'm just going to throw in an example, because it made me think of it when I watched your talk. I was working with a guy, and when we were working together he was so supportive and he was really engaged. But then every time we went to a stakeholder meeting or a big get-together with stakeholders from across the organization, he was very negative. And I just couldn't figure out why he was so positive when we were meeting one-on-one and then so negative in these group situations.

[00:07:48] We asked him what his motive was, what he was afraid of. We dug into it, and he said he likes the work we're doing, and he knows that we're an iterative team, so once we've solved that problem enough, we'll move on to the next problem. So he wants to make everyone else think his problem hasn't been solved. He loves working with us, and just doesn't want anybody else to know that it's going well.

[00:08:14] Justyna: Wow, well, that's an insight. I never had this situation. But as you said, nobody challenges without a reason, and maybe that person really enjoyed working with you and just wanted to continue. Maybe it's a different outcome but a similar situation: sometimes it also happens that a stakeholder or a client is super friendly with you in one-to-ones or the team stand-ups, but then when it comes to the bigger discussions with the bigger stakeholder groups, they are a little bit dismissive.

[00:08:52] A good way to mitigate those kinds of scenarios or situations is to involve that stakeholder in the creation of an output, so that their voice is part of the solution, or their recommendation is in the presentation or within the prototype, so that it makes them also vouch for what you're presenting. But of course, as you have just mentioned, so much depends on the reason behind why people are challenging. If they just want you to stay on the project, it's a totally different conversation than if they're challenging for some other reason.

[00:09:31] Rory: Well, thank you very much for your time and for the talk, I really enjoyed it. And if anybody has any questions, do throw them into the Ask the Speaker.