IT’S ONE THING to believe in doing right by users, but quite another to get people with fancy titles to draw connections between compassionate design and successful business. No matter how much you want to build the practices and principles we’ve covered into your work, you may still need to get the support of bosses, clients, or executives to make it real.

There are no easy answers to this, but as consultants, we’ve both spent a fair amount of time talking with business types about topics like web standards, accessibility, and user-friendly content. The best way we’ve found to gain buy-in is to:

• Define how this work will help the organization
• Develop and support an argument
• Determine the best way to approach your stakeholders

In this chapter, that’s what we’ll cover: ways to make a case for compassionate design, articulate it well, and bring it to the people you need on your side.

FIND STAKEHOLDERS’ PAIN POINTS

Every project and product has internal stakeholders—sometimes a couple, sometimes what feels like a million. One of the first ways to make space in your organization for a more human design process is to get those stakeholders on board.

When identifying your stakeholders, make sure to include:

• People who control budgets and set priorities (often at a senior level)
• People who run projects and processes, such as project or product managers
• People from other departments who need to buy into a proposed change
• People whose day-to-day work is most affected by changes, such as content creators and web production staff

These are the people who can approve, support, and implement the compassionate changes you recommend—or who can veto, thwart, or ignore those same changes if you don’t work to get them on your side.

So how do you get these people not only to believe in a kinder approach to design in theory, but to support it in practice? You need to understand their point of view. After all, if you can see the world through their eyes, you’ll be a lot more prepared to convince them to see it through yours.

That’s where stakeholder interviews come in. If they’re new to you, the concept is straightforward. Stakeholder interviews are the internal equivalent of user interviews: open-ended, one-on-one sessions with the people inside your organization (or your client’s company) who can make or break your project. They’re typically used to clarify the goals of the project from different perspectives, gather requirements, gain rapport with the team, and identify potential threats to the work.

When you ask those questions well—and when you use some of the follow-up techniques we outlined for user interviews in Chapter 6—people will tell you about a lot more than just their project vision. They’ll tell you about their own team’s goals, unmet needs, and frustrations.

While that might sound a bit negative, these interviews are a huge positive for your project. First, it’s best to hear any grievances early, long before you make decisions on design direction or discuss a user flow. Second, listening to people’s pain points does wonders for helping them feel that you’re on their side, and that the project will reflect their needs. Third, and most important for our purposes, these conversations can help you connect the dots between design decisions that will be kinder and more inclusive for your users, and your stakeholders’ own goals and needs.

That’s what one content strategist we spoke with found when she was working with an institution to overhaul its online forms. Her design team knew from the beginning that the forms needed work: over the years, they had been updated and added to many times, resulting in a complex, clunky experience. Perhaps worse, the team feared that the forms were also alienating users from diverse backgrounds.

But not everyone saw the problem at first. Historically, the organization had chalked up users’ challenges to the fact that the form was the first step in a complex process, not that the form itself was a barrier.

Rather than start out by trying to convince stakeholders that users might feel alienated, the team first went to each group to gain support for usability testing. They did this by asking questions:

• “What data do you wish users were providing that you’re not getting now?”
• “Where do you tend to get messy or unreliable data?”
• “How do you use this piece of information to drive other processes?”

The stakeholders replied with a list of questions they wished users would provide detailed answers to, as well as areas where they wound up doing time-consuming follow-up to resolve confusion and contradictions.

This insight gave the design team an inroad: they could then relate users’ experiences to stakeholders’ problems. They could say, “If we make it easier to fill out this form, we can increase the number of users who give us the kind of rich information you want.”

DETERMINE YOUR ANGLE

Next, you need to articulate the business benefit to your work. While “it’s the right thing to do” might be enough for some stakeholders, others will ask you to speak in terms of business opportunities and financial return. For those people, you’ll be best served by preparing a more formal business case.

Accessibility consultant Karl Groves has argued that there are really only three business cases for anything (https://hbr.org/2015/05/outsmart-your-own-biases):

• It will make money.
• It will save money.
• It will decrease risk.

According to Groves, it’s often difficult, or even impossible, to tie an accessibility project to a specific and tangible return—because taken by itself, the impact of accessibility is hard to quantify.

The same is true for designing with compassion: each small change to how you communicate with your users will not, most of the time, have a dramatic effect on your financial picture.

That doesn’t mean business cases aren’t worth making, though. Sometimes, you’ll be surprised at the potential financial impact you uncover. Other times, you’ll find that telling the story of kindness in budgets and bottom lines simply makes the conversation go more smoothly.

Let’s walk through a few potential business cases, and consider how we could use them to help us win support for the work we believe in.

IT WILL MAKE MONEY

We’ll stand out from competitors

A faster website, a smoother purchase flow, and a superior customer support system are all ways to differentiate a business from its competitors. So, too, is a more human and compassionate design. Tell your stakeholders to look at Slack—the messaging application that, in early 2015, shot to a $2.8 billion valuation after only a little over a year on the market (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/03/26/slacks-valuation-more-than-doubles-to-2-8-billion-in-five-months/).

Slack is winning out over competitors like HipChat and Yammer, in part, by being more empathetic in its design and operation. Slack makes it simple to get support or report an issue, and it relentlessly scours that feedback, looking for trends in feature requests or challenges users are having. It’s easy for users to customize settings, notifications, and even the skin color of their emoji. At every turn, Slack focuses on including all kinds of users.

In an interview with the New York Times, founder Stewart Butterfield explains why:

One way that empathy manifests itself is courtesy… It’s not just about having a veneer of politeness, but actually trying to anticipate someone else’s needs and meeting them in advance. (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/business/stewart-butterfield-of-slack-experience-with-empathy-required.html)

Sound familiar? It should, because this idea of courtesy is uncannily similar to the concept of compassion we discussed in Chapter 5: going beyond simply feeling for others, and making it your purpose to make things easier for them. That message—and the story of Slack’s success—is one that will both resonate with those seeking a competitive advantage, and create space for work that plans for stress cases and communicates compassionately.

We can reach new audiences

This argument works best if you’re trying to make space for more inclusive design, such as getting rid of potentially off-putting form fields in your onboarding process, or revising tricky product messaging. Here you’ll want to focus on how you can increase your product’s reach by designing it to hold up against more varied identities and use cases.

Say you’re working on a photo-sharing product. The current onboarding process asks users to provide their full name “so friends can easily find you.” Since the app doesn’t need users’ real names, you’d like to move that field to an optional screen at the end of the flow.

To get buy-in for this change, you could look at the percentage of users who download the app but never get past the real-name screen during signup. How many people feel alienated and never even try your product? By focusing on this missed opportunity, you could open the door to making a more compassionate design change, or even testing one out to see how it affects numbers.

IT WILL SAVE MONEY

We can cut customer-service costs

If a process is leading to lots of user frustration, then chances are it’s costing money in the form of increased support emails or call-center hours. That was the case at the Government Digital Service, the folks behind GOV.UK, which we talked about in Chapter 7.

According to its own research, as of 2011, the UK government was receiving 150 million avoidable calls a year—meaning an online service existed, but people were phoning in anyway (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/government-digital-strategy/government-digital-strategy#what-we-have-already-done). The constituents making those calls were often already upset and frustrated from trying to navigate the outdated, inefficient, and confusing network of government services. Across the board, non-digital transactions were costing the UK government around £4 billion per year.

As GDS releases more and more digital tools that are designed compassionately based on user needs, they’ve estimated that an annual savings of £1.7 to £1.8 billion is possible. Its approach is to focus on high-volume transactions—areas where GDS could see the most impact the fastest, which would help it gain both governmental and public trust.

If you’re in an organization where customer service or support costs are high, you might use GDS as an example of how user-centric, empathetic design can have a real—and even impressive—impact on the bottom line.

We can increase retention, rather than invest in finding new users

Depending on which study you read—and plenty exist—it’s anywhere from five to twenty-five times more expensive to find a new customer than to retain an existing one (https://hbr.org/2014/10/the-value-of-keeping-the-right-customers/). If your product relies on repeat visitors, you can make a case that more compassionate design will keep people engaged in your product longer (and maybe even persuade them to recommend it).

For example, Dan Hon, the content director at Code for America and a former interactive creative director at Wieden+Kennedy, told us about his experience using activity trackers after being diagnosed with Type II diabetes. He started monitoring his blood glucose levels, tracking his weight, and documenting his food intake. What he realized is that many trackers don’t work for people with chronic conditions like his, because goals are tied to individual days and tend to focus on unbroken streaks or continuous repetition—rather than making a user feel successful for sustaining changes over time. He says:

[These companies] don’t realize or put value on the fact that you don’t want to be discouraging to someone with a chronic condition or who wants long-term change. You missed one day so you break that thirty-day streak. You start from zero again…

We are not reflecting the cognitive technique of “tomorrow I can try again.”

In circumstances like these, you can argue that when a user has already decided they want to use your product, identifying stress cases—like Hon’s example of a chronic illness—can lead to design solutions that prevent people from feeling discouraged or disconnected when their real lives don’t add up to the narrow success stories the product-makers first envisioned.

To make this case, get data on customer attrition rates, and then pair it with information about why people stop using your product by mining trends from product reviews, social media posts, and customer service inquiries.

IT WILL DECREASE RISK

We can avoid negative experiences, which cause backlash

Any time we create a negative experience for a user, we risk losing them forever. Think of people who vow never to fly with an airline because it once lost their luggage. Even if they got their luggage back later the same day, they never forgot that initial negative experience.

We face similar risks with our designs. It’s bad enough to create a difficult user experience; do that often enough, and users will go elsewhere out of frustration. Deeper emotional reactions—grief, pain, anger—will drive them away even faster.

Any negative experience has the potential to spread, creating bad press. Particularly egregious examples tend to go viral—like Eric’s Year in Review story, which ended up on CNN, the Washington Post, Le Monde, and countless media outlets around the world where Facebook undoubtedly would rather not have seen the story.

We can prevent losing core users’ trust

If your organization wants to launch a feature that you worry isn’t well tested, you might build your business case around trust. Once you’ve established trust with a core user base, a new feature that alienates them—like Flickr’s autotags from Chapter 1—can create a massive outcry, turning your best brand supporters against you and creating extensive customer-service and reputation-management headaches.

By slowing down and vetting product and design decisions more carefully, you can uncover gaps and weaknesses that would breach your core users’ trust, and avoid costly problems down the line.

DEVELOP AN ARGUMENT

Once you understand your stakeholders’ pain points and have an angle in mind, it’s time to construct your argument. In The Content Strategy Toolkit, Meghan Casey provides a framework for doing just that—and it works just as well for design projects as it does for content strategy.

Using a simple version of philosopher Stephen Toulmin’s argumentation model, Casey writes that an argument has six key features:

• Claim: the statement you are asking someone to accept
• Grounds: the data and facts to support your claim
• Warrant: how the data is relevant to your claim
• Backing: information that supports your claim
• Qualifier: the likelihood that the data supports the warrant
• Rebuttal: the response to anticipated challenges to your claim

Let’s say you’re a designer for Glow, the period-tracking app, and you want to make the case that the company could increase its user base if it offered a more inclusive message. Your argument might look like this:

• Claim: we can increase user growth by 10% per month if we stop forcing users to select one of the three categories at onboarding.
• Grounds: currently, 25% of the people who download our app never sign up for Glow. That means only 75% of downloads become users.
• Warrant: we need to convert more downloads to users to reach our growth goals, and we can only do that if we include women who don’t fit one of those three categories.
• Backing: after all, according to Pew research, one in five Americans over age twenty-five has never married, and that doesn’t even count teens and college students. Plus, a YouGov survey reported that one in three Americans under thirty don’t consider themselves heterosexual. That means our options won’t fit a lot of people’s lives.
• Qualifier: changing our process won’t convert all of that 25%, but if we can convert one-third of those users, that will mean more than 83% of downloads become active users. That’s an 11% increase in monthly growth rate.
• Rebuttal: I know you’re concerned that a more complicated onboarding process might detract from our easygoing brand, but I’ve thought of ways we can tweak our wording and loosen categories without adding more screens.

Boom. You’ve got a believable, thought-out case for compassion that makes your organization money. You may never need to share your argument in this form, but writing it out like this forces you to think it all the way through—and prepares you for questions or pushback you’ll get along the way.

PRESENT YOUR CASE

Once you have an argument you think will resonate, it’s time to decide how you’ll bring it to your audience, and what you’ll propose to get started.

There’s no one right way to do this; it all depends on your organization’s culture and structure, and how you fit into it. Here are a few techniques we’ve seen work, and how to use them.

Take your argument on the road

Before requesting an official project or budget, consider creating a roadshow: taking a proposal to multiple teams, departments, or executives to ask for support individually. This lets you tailor your pitch to the goals of each person or group, and can work wonders in consensus-driven cultures, where one dissenting team can quash a project.

Create a spectacle

If your organization tends to stick to business-as-usual, consider turning your case into a spectacle: something that’s impossible to ignore. For example, the content strategist we mentioned earlier knew from user research that the forms she was redesigning were excluding and alienating users, particularly those who were low-income. But her team needed their stakeholders to see it, too, before they’d get support for the changes they wanted to see happen.

So they prepared a research presentation that wasn’t just a slide deck or a series of quotes, but actual video and audio clips—clips showing users struggling, or getting dejected. One revealed a user unable to complete a field because it required information about a family member who was deceased. Another showed a user spending thirty minutes struggling with a single page.

When they presented the clips at a stakeholder meeting, the room went silent. No one played with their phones. No one looked bored. “It never occurred to them that this experience could be unkind,” the content strategist told us. “It was like a switch had been flipped.” The team’s stakeholders were so struck by the users’ stories that they referred to them throughout the meeting. Their commitment to the project was cemented that day.

Use the improv approach

Another way to make space for compassionate processes is to tack them onto work that’s already underway, or ideas that already have support. We call this the improv approach because it uses the common improv theater technique of saying “yes, and”: yes, we can improve transaction completion rates, and we’ll do that by removing these extra form fields that may alienate users. Yes, let’s move to modular content so we can better support mobile, and while we’re at it, we’ll reprioritize those modules to better support stress cases.

This approach works because it supports others’ ideas, rather than putting them in competition with, or in opposition to, your goals. This helps others draw connections between their goals and yours, and can make it easier to keep projects moving.

SPREAD COMPASSION

Approvals and budgets are powerful tools, but they’re not the only ones. We’ve found that it’s also incredibly helpful—and often necessary—to become an evangelist for this work. When you share ideas and approaches with anyone who’ll listen, you’ll sow the seeds for a grassroots shift in thinking that can, over time, turn into real cultural change.

There are lots of ways to be an evangelist within your organization. You can bring in outside experts to talk about a specific issue—sometimes, just having a third party with credibility say what you’ve been saying will make people pay attention—and because they’re an outsider, they’ll have an easier time representing the user’s point of view, too. In fact, Facebook has brought in speakers critical of its work, like Mike Monteiro and Eric, precisely for this reason.

You might hold a lunch-and-learn, where you share examples of experiences that break for users who don’t fit the mold—and the ensuing bad press—to show your organization the real risk of ignoring these issues. Or you could host an open session where people can bring in work in progress and focus on identifying points of stress or potential alienation. Heck, you could even leave copies of this book around the office.

MAKE A HABIT OF IT

Most of us don’t have the power to change our company’s values or realign budgets overnight. We do have the opportunity to become advocates for the users who are easiest to ignore: those whose lives and identities don’t fit the unrealistic ideals our organizations tend to focus on. The more we help others see the world from those users’ eyes, the more difficult it will be for them to push those users to the edges of our work.

Most of the time, the business cases we’ll need to make won’t require massive slide decks full of buzzwords. They’ll just take practice understanding our colleagues’ concerns, speaking their language, and making a believable case. So take the tools and techniques we’ve identified and try them out—and then keep trying them until you feel confident talking about compassion with everyone in your organization.