Communicate to stakeholders
Reading time: 2 minutes
At this point, you’ve analyzed your project 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 a moment to reach out to your stakeholders to communicate all this progress.
Use this critical moment to bring stakeholders up to speed on what you’ve done. This will help you avoid missing key points of view, give you an opportunity to start socializing your design, and clear the way for a rational, evidence-based assessment approach whose results will be accepted across the organization.
If you skip this step, you can find yourself revising and revising as people question your direction and methods, which causes the goalposts to keep moving for someone to save face or take credit. Remember that you are trying to make an impact. If you have agreement on the direction and testing, and you find that the tests tell you that 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.
Note
Key Idea
Over the course of the entire HCD process, transparently socializing progress and approaches 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.
