That’s the title of the article I just published on UXmatters, in which I give advice on how to soften the blow of delivering bad news to clients. Let’s face it, when we perform an expert evaluation, usability testing, or user research on an existing product – most of what we find is problems with the current product. Clients don’t pay us to tell them how great their products are. If they’ve hired us, it’s to find problems that can be fixed. But there are ways to make it easier to deliver bad news. In this article I provide the following advice:
- Get the stakeholders to admit that it’s ugly first
- Get everyone to buy into your research methods upfront
- Encourage stakeholders to observe the research
- Blame the bad news on the participants
- Back up your findings with metrics
- Present recordings and quotations
- Don’t beat your audience over the head
- Emphasize your expertise
- Back up your findings with examples of best practices
- Show your stakeholders they’re not alone
- Position it as providing recommendations, not pointing out problems
- Mention the positive aspects too
- Deliver your findings in person
- Prioritize the problems they should solve
- Provide a plan for addressing the problems
You can find more details about this advice in my latest article, Your Baby is Ugly.
Another UX Guy 