Communicate to Stakeholders

At this point, you’ve analyzed your project’s affordances and constraints through convergent and divergent thinking, generated multiple design ideas, built those out with references, and discussed them and figured out what to forward. Now take moment to reach out to your stakeholders to communicate all this progress.

Using this critical moment to bring stakeholders up to speed on what you’ve done allows you to gain agreement up front on your direction. Going through this step will help you avoid missing key points of view, gives you an opportunity to start socializing your design, and clears the way for a rational, evidence-based assessment approach whose results will be accepted across the organization.

Without this step, it’s easy to find yourself revising and revising as people question your direction and methods, which causes the goalposts to move over and over again for the sake of someone saving face or taking credit. Remember that you are trying to make impact. If you have agreement on the direction and testing, and you go out and find that the tests tell you the your prototype isn’t working, you’ll be much better able to bring that news to stakeholders if you brought them along in the first place instead of keeping your process under wraps. Over the course of the entire HCD process, socializing approaches and being transparent sets you up to save yourself and your organization from implementing an ineffective strategy, and presents an opportunity to learn and create the next, better version.