Part of anticipating how people will react is preparing in advance the alternatives that you considered or that you think will be suggested. Here is a quick description and cover image of book Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience written by Tom Greever which was published in 2015-8-25.

I just love how you can see everything all the time,” she said, “We should use that for our navigation, instead! A daily meeting with your boss will require less, but it’s still a good idea if there are issues that might be difficult to discuss or if you’re unsure how you might say it. I often say the same kinds of things to defend my projects and I’ve compiled them here for reference.These support roles are an important consideration for how we design, and factoring it into our decision process is an important point to clarify. The types of decisions a designer makes during the design process will vary depending on an organization’s size and the product’s maturity. This experience provides designers with a boilerplate to begin work, but it won’t solve every problem and quickly becomes outdated–meaning, experience alone is unreliable, which leads us to intuition. Over time, designers make these decisions unconsciously, like creating layouts, alignment, and spacing.

When you find your team getting off track, bring them back by reminding everyone what the use cases are and how our decisions affect them. These could be in the form of questions that might be asked or opinions you think will be expressed. So go through each of your designs, look at the agenda for the meeting, and decide the best flow for presenting your ideas.Maybe we can go over everything before these meetings so that I can back you up and we can all speak with one voice. Every designer has had to justify designs to non-designers, yet most lack the ability to explain themselves in a way that is compelling and fosters agreement. These people should always be prepared to come to your defense if things take a turn that you’re not expecting. Often, these constraints cannot be foreseen when creating the original designs, and it is only during implementation that we have to make these adjustments. What seems like a fuzzy, soft skill might actually be more of a recipe: personality + role / values + observed reactions = predictable behavior!

Helping them understand where we’ve run into problems can shape the conversation of branding to expand and include other elements that might not previously have been considered. Although it is less important to the overall user experience, I often find myself justifying design decisions based solely on the branding standards of the organization. These can be the most difficult decisions to help other nondesigners (and nondevelopers) understand because the reasons are often highly technical. We may not remember everything that needs to be communicated, and a ringer can jump in to cover anything we forgot. Often, clients will ask me to share the entire document with them so that they, too, can use the information to convince other stakeholders.Ask them to help you with writing the justification for the decision so that everyone is on the same page about your rationale. As often as we’re justifying our decisions based on what we think needs to be done, we are also making a case for times when there are limitations that need to be taken into consideration.