The Color Blue Question

August 20, 2004

A large part of what I do is sell ideas. Sure, I develop IA stuff, do usability, and design navigation systems, but it all comes down to my ability to sell an idea. I have sat through thousands of design review session with Senior Stakeholders where everything was going well until I got the dreaded "Color Blue Question"

Now, for the uninitiated there are questions that always come up in meetings such as "How does that work?," I don't agree with you, " or "I am confused by this therefore it must be difficult to use" All of these types of questions can be addressed with either further explanation, agreement to disagree but finding a path to move forward, or more importantly rebutted with actual usability data or research. Those types of questions are even under the most trying circumstances manageable--even at worst case as the facilitator of the review you can reach a compromise and maintain the heart of your design.

However, there are times (and they happen more often than you think) where people object and have a preference because they just do. Those types of instances are what I like to call a "Color Blue Question." These types of questions tend to come up most after we have already agreed to the overall user experience and design, but have not yet shown a creative design skin on top of the skeleton.

Sooner or later when we show visual comps, someone will say "I don't like the fact that a country selector is grey, I think it should be blue" or "I believe we need to have a additional graphic here..." usually these items are small, but they can at times compromise the overall user experience of the product. Unfortunately, in most of these cases "Color Blue Questions" are ones that you could probably argue against, but in the end you will never win. They are in fact stakeholder preferences that are very hard if not impossible to overcome.

So, when faced with a "Color Blue Question," I constantly am asking myself as to how much of an impact is it on the overall user experience and if it is worth the political capital to fight it. In those situations I only choose to fight if it truly compromises the heart of the design and will adversely impact the User. After all, that is who I am representing in the sessions in addition to my clients. Even if I know that I may loose the argument, if it is serious enough a single raising of the hand on a very critical item being challenged by the dreaded "Color Blue" may be necessary.

In the end this type of objection (as I said earlier), is a preference. After all it is very hard to refute a statement that falls into the genre of "I like the color blue because I like the color blue"

So say it once and say it with pride, "I like the color blue, because I like the color blue." Now, go think of a way to challenge that kind of statement while still gaining agreement on the larger issue and you will know what I am talking about first hand.