80% of design meetings can be made moot. As Steve Krug explains, design and dev arguments are often mostly about personal opinion.

To end these arguments quickly, here’s 3 ways to make it a moot point.

Sanity check

When: You’re talking about how to redesign a feature that people can only use after being on your site for more than half an hour. (E.g. a feature that only comes into play after users use some other feature) Or you’re talking about making any new feature.

How to make it moot:
Show that nobody is going to use it because nobody has the prereqs.

For example, if you’re talking about text on a feature that lets customers upload pictures of them shearing sheep, note that none of your customers currently do this, so the text is moot because nobody is going to see it.

Or, if you’re talking about color changes for a feature that customers only use after they have uploaded 5 pictures of pumpkin pie, show that 95% of your customers have only uploaded one pie picture, so the color is moot since nobody will see it. (Assuming, of course, that 100% of the 5% that do cannot be persuaded to pay by changing the color)

7 minute abs

When: You’re talking about whether you should use ‘Hero’ or ‘Saviour’ for your homepage text. The hippo says that it should be “Hero,” while the dev team thinks it should be “Savior”.

How to make it moot:
Just do both, and AB test it. Discussion over. With tools like google web optimizer, and 7 minute abs for rails there’s no excuse not to test everything, and no excuse not to try things.

Ask people

When: You’re making a feature and one designer says it won’t be clear to users how it works, or what to do. Another designer (the guy that made it), says it’s 100% bursting with clarity.

How to make it moot:
Grab someone, take them to the page, and ask them what things mean and what the page is for. If they can’t tell you in 10 seconds, it’s not clear enough. If the person in the hallway happens to be your cto, or someone familiar with the site, grab people off the street, or get a few people from the business next door. If that sounds too hard, go on aim or gchat and ask some of your friends. Like AB testing, this is so easy that there’s no excuse not to do it.

That’s it! I hope this post helps end a few meetings.