Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

STAKEHOLDERS AND THE SIXTH FINGER
As I discussed earlier, storytelling not only makes for a richer user experience, but it can
be instrumental in getting your work approved, and also in creating a work culture that is
more attuned to user experience concerns. The single biggest complaint I’ve heard from
my students about actually practicing UX on the job is, “My boss just keeps descoping all
the most important parts of the experience.”
I’ve felt this same thing many times in my own work, and I’ve told some stories
already in this book about my experiences with it. Sometimes our ideas are shot down for
good reasons—maybe they’re just too innovative. I don’t mind features being removed
then, because I’ve probably gotten away from thinking about what the user really wants
and needs. But sometimes the feature being nixed is a component that affects the core
usability. No matter; the people in charge of approvals are still totally free to overrule you.
This can make it tempting to resort to subterfuge.
I’ll never forget the time a senior designer told me a story of the sixth finger. It was at
the Wall Street Journal, where we had a stakeholder known for always getting his way.
His opinions were unmovable, and they often clashed with what we wanted to do. One
tactic we used was to give him options to try to steer his decision-making. People had
competing theories about the best way to do this: Do you put the best option last, so that
you end the presentation with a eureka moment for him, or do you put it first to try to set a
positive tone for the review? None seemed to work very well.
Then one day I was preparing a review with a more senior designer. I had designed
three options for a navigation model, one of which we felt was the clear winner, and made
simple wireframes to show them. To my surprise, when I showed my wireframes to my
colleague, he took a pen and started to draw in the rest of the interface that the navigation
was a part of. “We’re painting the king a sixth finger,” he said. I had no idea what he was
talking about. He explained, “In dealing with a tyrant king, you want to distract his
attention from any real issues by supplying him with fake ones.” If he sees a sixth finger—
the obvious mistake—he won’t pay attention to something else going on with the first
five. When the day of the review came, we got plenty of feedback from “the tyrant,” but it
was all about our layout. The navigation made it through unscathed. The sixth finger had
worked!
You don’t really want to have to resort to this (though you might want to try it
sometimes). Much better is to tell a really good story to stakeholders.
Video prototypes are a great way of doing this. They provide a richer visual
experience of your design than either flat wireframes or even more high-fidelity
prototypes often can. Many people who don’t make wireframes find them very hard to
follow, and there’s nothing at all engaging about them. By contrast, a product video can be
filled with emotion and fictional content, allowing stakeholders to actually have some of
the experience you’re promising.
Both types of prototype represent the nexus of all your research and drawing, and
once you progress to creating the higher-fidelity versions that you’ll most often want to
use for testing with users, they should include thoughts around content strategy,