Soft skills, like collaboration and stakeholder management, are now accepted as vital skills in the design profession. It is also generally understood that we need to tailor our message to different audiences, whether the audience is a different personality or behavioural type, or a different stakeholder within a team. By speaking on the same wavelength, be that emotional or technical, we can convey the intended message and are better able to persuade. I want to show you how to become a better communicator and facilitator by telling you about heuristics and how it influences communication.

Everyone uses heuristics (also known as rules of thumb or mental short cuts). It saves us time and effort in making judgments. However, it also short circuits our thinking and makes us think in certain ways. I want to examine some pitfalls when using heuristics to communicate design decisions and how to overcome them. In this article I am referring to heuristics relating to general decision-making, not design related heuristics like design patterns or Nielsen's usability heuristics.

Designers communicate to persuade management, clients or other designers of the value of their work. What they are actually (or should be) communicating are the risks (i.e. the likelihood of success) and rewards of adopting a potential solution. And then the risks and accompanying rewards of all the other possible solutions have to be weighed up to determine the best choice. No wonder heuristics are used!

And as you can see from the diagram, when some rule of thumb offers you a quick solution, heuristics seem to help you select the best choice: low risk, high reward. But they can, according to Wikipedia, lead to suboptimal decisions. I think this is because many heuristics are founded on the premise that past performance is a reliable indicator of future performance (called the familiarity heuristic). Another one is the similarity heuristic, which people use to select an option that is similar to something that produced a positive experience in the past. More innovative choices are riskier by virtue of their novelty. So, heuristic based decisions can stifle innovation and variety, which leads to solutions that are suboptimal for the business and the user.

Adding a third axis of innovation on the next diagram shows how heuristics fall short when measured for innovation, leading to potentially inferior design decisions. When you only choose options based on heuristics your choices suddenly seem quite limited.

And when you, the designer, argue for an optimal solution, decision-makers often lean on heuristics to reach a decision efficiently and minimize perceived risk. The prettiness of a presentation or amount of work perceived to have been put in to it, the latest buzzword or bandwagon are often used to weigh up the argument at hand, instead of judging a proposal purely on its merits. All these signals are useful and important indicators of risk and reward that influence almost everyone to some extent, but they are not always the most reliable indicators and are biased towards established solutions. This is actually an area of study called "cognitive bias mitigation".

So, heuristics have pros and cons, but if you understand them and the person you are speaking to, you can argue a case more convincingly. First, get on a positive footing by speaking to the heuristic that they use, even if it's not the best or most reliable measure to judge by. Then, reinforce the argument with objective information that can be used to make a rational decision. You also then have a better chance of arguing other points based on that objective information.

When heuristics work against you, persuasion is obviously more difficult. One answer is to provide enough information about the choices to make a well thought out decision by doing more research or taking a lean approach and testing and failing fast. Another is to leverage other heuristics that work in your favour, for example, "Company X in industry Y is having great success with Z."

Another way would be to remind the decision-maker of the consequences of making a wrong decision. Doing this will make them expend more cognitive effort and think through the problem more objectively. When you do this, you will obviously need clear data points to base a decision on for all your choices, because otherwise they will have no choice but to fall back on heuristics.

What makes heuristics such a necessary and fascinating design (and life!) tool, is that everyone uses it is and everyone uses it unconsciously. If you are aiming to produce the best possible outcome and not just 'satisfice', it pays to have a proper understanding of the tools in your tool belt. As a UX designer, I propose solutions and facilitate decision-making, so knowing how to persuade is critical. As a facilitator, the secret to using heuristics appropriately is to know what heuristics are being used by others and leveraging them where possible or discouraging their use and offering a better basis for deciding so that it is easy for others to make decisions wisely.