Success With Stakeholders

Hola Smashing Friends,

No project can be successful without successful stakeholders. Yet too often, ideas, motivations, goals, and business requirements get entangled in messy, confusing, inefficient collaboration — often causing failures and disruptions instead of success. Let’s see how teams deal with just that.

Meet AI 2027 Conference — a practical conference on state of AI 2027 and how to make the best out of it. Only €50. Get your ticket.

Mark your calendars! We’ll be running AI 2027 Conference on AI-ready design systems and shining the spotlight on the state of AI in 2027. How to run AI-driven research and design for trust in AI — with Brad Frost, TJ Pitre, Christine Vallaure, and yours truly. Jump to tickets.

Until then, we’ve organized fantastic online workshops for you this month, and a few more until the end of the year:

• Deep Dive On Accessibility Testing Dev
  with Manuel Matuzović. Nov 9 – Nov 23
• Design Patterns For AI 2027 UX + self-paced course
  with Vitaly Friedman. Nov 16–24
• AI-Ready Design Systems For Designers DS
  with Christine Vallaure. Nov 30 – Dec 4
• Make Your Design System Work, for Humans and Robots DS
  with Javier Cuello. Dec 1 – Dec 3
• Designing Websites That Convert UX
  with Paul Boag. Dec 7
• Designing For Complex UIs Masterclass UX
  with Vitaly Friedman. December 2–16
• UX Strategy Masterclass UX
  with Vitaly Friedman. December 11–15
• Jump to all workshops →

Wishing you a wonderful, optimistic, and positive week, everyone! You’ll achieve miraculous things this week! ☀️

— Vitaly

1. How To Stop The Stakeholder Swirl

It’s frustrating when design reviews turn into endless cycles of feedback without clear decisions. Parvaneh Toghiani, Principal Designer at Uber, shares the framework she has developed over the years to make reviews more systematic, productive, and enjoyable. Precious tips for embracing reviews as opportunities for alignment and growth instead of seeing them merely as a path to approval.

2. Questions For Stakeholder Interviews

Asking the right questions is crucial to truly understanding your stakeholders. Vitaly shares his strategy for getting the most of your stakeholder interviews, with tips for designing the conversation around listening and questions you can ask power users and decision makers to gain meaningful insights.

3. Improving Design Critiques

If you struggle with design critiques, no worries, you are not alone. Running them effectively is challenging, and many teams struggle to do so, whether it’s in a startup setting or a Fortune 25 company. Jeremy Bird shares best practices to help you increase the effectiveness of your critiques and become better at both presenting and critiquing work.

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4. Incentive Architecture

When two people have the same incentives, you can be sure that something will get done quickly and without drama, but when incentives are misaligned, things often get emotional and business results may suffer. Abby Covert explains how an incentive architecture helps you better understand how the people you work with make decisions, and what that means for reaching your own intentions.

5. The Art Of Interviewing Stakeholders

When you go into a stakeholder interview, you have two goals: you want to learn something from this person, and you want to learn something about them. What is it like to work with them? What does it take to keep them engaged? Dan Brown shares practical tips and techniques to help you build a script and ask the right questions.

Do you have a meowment?

20 Years and Counting: Thanks For Being Smashing!

Did you know that SmashingMag has been around for 20 years? Yep, time flies! If Smashing has helped you learn something, solve a problem, or see things from a new perspective, please do consider making a one-time contribution. Your support truly helps us keep practical web knowledge open and accessible to everyone. 🧡

6. User Centered Design Canvas

Nine fields that fit on just one sheet of A4 paper and capture your users’ problems, motives, and fears, as well as the solutions and competitive advantages your business has to offer. That’s the User-Centered Design Canvas, a useful UX tool to help teams design products that truly meet users’ needs. Alina Prelicz-Zawadzka explains step by step how it works.

7. The Stakeholder Interview

To design the right thing, you need to thoroughly understand the problem you’re solving. Anton Sten shares an approach to stakeholder interviews that gives the other person the opportunity to not just answer but paint the whole picture — by listening carefully, keeping questions open-ended, and actively following up to dig deeper.

8. Diving Deep Into The Real World Of Accessible UX Research

Have you grabbed a copy of our latest Smashing book yet? “Accessible UX Research” is your practical guide to making UX research more inclusive of participants with different needs — from planning and recruiting to facilitation, asking better questions, avoiding bias, and building trust.

Get ready for a deep dive into the real world of Accessible UX Research.

Dr. Michele A. Williams draws from years of experience to build a clear, easy-to-follow roadmap. This book has something for everyone who wants to build digital products well. You can download a free sample (PDF, 2.3MB) or get the book right away.

Person Of The Week: Wouter de Bres

Please give a warm round of applause for our Person of the Week: Wouter de Bres. Wouter is a psychologist turned product designer. He has almost two decades of experience designing digital products. After co-founding the agency Bread & Pepper and the edtech startup Gibbon, he spent several years leading and growing product design teams.

Today, Wouter works as a freelancer, partnering with startup founders to design simpler, more effective user experiences. He shares his knowledge about human behavior and how to design for it in his free book Product Design Psychology.

Thank you for everything you do for the community, dear Wouter! 🧡

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That’s All, Folks!

Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!

This newsletter issue was written and edited by Cosima Mielke, Vitaly Friedman, and Iris Lješnjanin.

Sent to truly smashing readers via Mailchimp.
We sincerely appreciate your kind support. You rock.

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