Negotiation is the skill of UX
A prototype is like a peace treaty. It's shown to representatives of all the interested parties - the users, the delivery teams, the business - with the hope of learning from their feedback and changing the details until everyone's happy. This isn't high-stakes conflict resolution, of course. It's only digital. But the work is aimed at the resolution of competing interests nonetheless. The people we're dealing with aren't literally at war, but what they value does pull them in different directions - and finding the win-win takes some working out.
It's the same across the discipline. Create a new taxonomy and we show it to users to see whether it matches their mental model; to the tech team to be sure they can support its structure; to the business to check they're happy presenting themselves this way. Sketch an interaction and we test it with users for intuitiveness, with developers for feasibility across devices, with stakeholders for fit with the brand. Along the way we iterate - but not just for users' needs. We adjust the elements at play until we've negotiated as big a win for everyone as we can.
Identifying ideas vs. executing them
Our agenda is twofold: identify brilliant ideas, and execute them well.
Execution is the more time-consuming and collaborative of the two, so when web-makers think of negotiation they usually think of this part. Negotiating well in execution helps push an idea through production. Compromises get made, but in the spirit of implementing as much of the original vision as possible. As Alan Cooper put it, "design is a power struggle".
But negotiation is more than promoting our agenda. The most important negotiations happen while identifying what the agenda should be in the first place. An idea can't be brilliant unless it represents a satisfactory negotiation of the competing interests of everyone around it.
We've all been there: you research what users need, prototype, improve through several rounds of testing, and arrive at what you're convinced is a brilliant solution - only to discover the development team can't build it, or the business can't sell it. Let's be honest: that solution was never brilliant. It was a waste of time.
Starting with the user need?
Here's why. We don't ever really start with the user need.
Yes, we create user journeys that begin with a user intention - but the next step is always an interaction with our product or service, and there are always other interests at play, the first of which is usually an organisational or monetary goal. We should stop pretending we care most about the user and be more honest about the need to weave other interests into the mix.
The title "UX designer" can be unhelpful here. It tempts practitioners to picture themselves as the authority who represents the user - the person closest to the research, whose job is to determine what each experience should be. They might be diligent, talented, even great craftspeople, and still produce terrible work, simply because they believed that user interests are the ones that matter most. You've met them: the ones who roll their eyes at decisions they don't like, who get stuck on what they think they saw in the research, believing (wrongly) that this is the only light that needs shining on the situation. Their unreadiness to negotiate gets in the way of good work - which is especially frustrating if you believe, as I do, that negotiation is precisely what they're there to help with.
UX delivers value when it considers all the interested parties. The work is valuable if and only if it provides the insight that guides the win-win.
Getting to Yes
The world's best-selling book on negotiation, Roger Fisher and William Ury's Getting to Yes, outlines an approach in four steps - and each maps directly onto UX practice:
Separate people from the problem → understand context, emotions and needs (empathy)
Focus on interests, not positions → look beyond what people say they want (analysis)
Invent options for mutual gain → learn through iteration and feedback (prototyping and testing)
Insist on objective criteria → standards, research and validation (hypothesis-driven)
Separate people from the problem. Wherever humans are involved - clients, collaborators, customers - people-problems come along with the design challenge, and the two must be dealt with separately. This is what empathic listening and facilitation are for: encouraging all voices to be heard while keeping focus on the most relevant questions. It's not about filtering out emotion; it's about zeroing in on what's pertinent. When you're facilitating a sketching workshop and one person squashes every idea before it can develop, it's your job to notice and deal with it. When a testing participant gets too nervous to talk freely, you find a way to put them at ease.
Focus on interests, not positions. Getting to Yes tells a story about two sisters arguing over an orange. Neither backs down, so they split it in half - only to discover that one wanted the fruit and the other wanted the peel. Had they shared what they were actually interested in, both could have had everything they wanted. This is why, in usability testing, you never invite users to express opinions. You ask them to complete tasks, then enquire into their motivations, expectations and behaviour as they think aloud. And when you're running a design critique with a client, you ask how the work serves their underlying goals. You never, ever ask people whether they like your work.
Invent options for mutual gain. Spread the net wide before narrowing the field. Exhaust options in collaborative sketching sessions, where part of the point is to fill the bin with discarded ideas. Each one gets you closer to something worth prototyping, testing and reviewing - all with a view to finding the thing that delivers value for everyone.
Insist on objective criteria. Where it's hard to agree on a way forward, we can at least agree on an objective way to decide. Sometimes that's cold fact-checking; sometimes softer, qualitative measures. But it always involves research or validation of some kind - and the criteria can always be described in both directions: a design "works" when it accords with users' mental models and when engagement or conversion moves. It's never a coincidence that great UX is good for business.
Why this matters more now, not less
You might think a decade of design systems and generative AI would have made this framing quaint. But evidence points the other way.
Nielsen Norman Group's State of UX 2026 describes a field that has been through layoffs, hiring freezes and an AI-hype narrative that designers were replaceable - and is now stabilising around a harder question: what can't be automated?
As AI raises the floor on interface production, anyone can assemble a decent-looking UI, and the interface itself becomes less of a differentiator. Practices focused on producing artifacts, rather than on strategic problem framing, are becoming difficult to justify. What organisations are recovering demand for is senior, adaptable practitioners who can connect design work to outcomes - who can hold the frame across misaligned stakeholders, competing priorities and unclear ownership.
That is a description of a negotiator.
And the newest design problems are negotiation problems too. NN/g identify trust as the design challenge for AI experiences: users burned by half-ready features, businesses eager to ship them, systems that fail in unpredictable ways. Reconciling user confidence, commercial ambition and technical reality is exactly the work described above - interests, not positions; options for mutual gain; objective criteria for what "ready" means.
It's no longer enough to be a good mediator. The win-win now has to be made visible - framed in outcomes the whole organisation can see. The negotiation includes making the case for the negotiation.
The skill of UX
The difference between good and bad UX work is the amount of problem definition and problem solving it does. Someone must form the bridge between all the interests at play: with the empathy to separate people from the problem, the analytical skill to focus on interests rather than positions, the eagerness to assess options for mutual gain, and the discipline to validate against objective criteria. They might be a UXer, a product manager, a service designer. The title doesn't matter. That the four things happen does.
Negotiation is more than a core UX skill. Negotiation is the skill of UX. It joins every strand of the work together - the workshop, the research, the prototype - each meaningful in so far as it seeks the win-win for all the interested parties. Great UX was never the product of a genius designer working from a private vision. At its best, it is nothing more or less than principled negotiation. And that's not a skill under threat.