Presenting Your Work
Any schoolteacher who ever assigned a presentation to me justified their awful directive by saying:
“At some point in your life, you’re going to have to present something to someone.”
…and I thought (loosely paraphrased but just as pompous):
“That’s ridiculous. I’m going to live in a perfect world, where everything I decide is immediately understood and agreed upon by all of society. My decisions will be so clear and virtuous that I’ll never have to convince anyone of anything. I really am the smartest human alive.”
I lived in that happy world until at the age of 16 I found myself behind the cash register at a movie theater concessions stand, trying to convince customers to upgrade their medium drink to a large for “just a quarter”. A concessionist has many duties, but in those halcyon days we lived and died by the up-sell. If a manager saw a customer walking away from your stand with a small popcorn, your day was not going to end well. I was surprised to discover that if I didn’t learn to sell, I would never be good at this most basic of jobs.
When I started my design career, the importance of sales experience became shockingly clear. I realized that my job was about 30% design and 70% sales. First I sell my thinking to co-workers, and then I sell it to people who have staked their money and reputation on my ability to solve their problems.
When the true challenges of design emerged, it became obvious that school didn’t prepare me for the pressure. I discovered that making something look good is the easiest part of my job, and convincing someone that I’ve solved their problems is among the toughest.
Working at agencies for most of my career has taught me a lot about sharing with clients. I used that experience to put together some advice that will help you give better design presentations.
Each step in the design process is harder than the one that came before it, but the one constant throughout is that you need to present your work and convince people of its value. If you can’t sell your work you aren’t really a designer at all.
Plan the conversation ahead of time
This is an obvious but often-overlooked point. How many times have you left a meeting only to realize that you talked about everything except the thing you most needed feedback on? To make sure I hit all my points, I prepare a conversation outline and use it to keep the meeting on track. It doesn’t have to be long. It just needs to include everything you want to talk about and the most important questions that you need to ask.
Present as a team
When improv groups prepare to go on stage, it’s like going into battle. They know that whatever happens out there, they’ll pick each other up and jump in if someone starts to falter.
Presenting design work is the same way. If you have a team backing you up it’s so important to remember that you’re not alone up there. A good team is with you every step of the way. They are there to jump in if you need support.
To foster this mentality it’s a good idea to gather before the meeting and review everyone’s roles and expectations for one another. It creates a feeling of unity that carries over into the presentation.
Tell the client what you need from them
Decide what you need to get out of the presentation and communicate that to your client. Without direction, people provide feedback about the wrong things. A person might have opinions about the color, but what I really need to know is if I’ve left out information that we absolutely need to show on a given screen.
Talk in terms of goals and solutions. Avoid jargon.
99% of your clients won’t know what a tab bar is, but they’ll understand when you tell them that you put the three most important user actions at the bottom of the screen so that people can access them easier.
We all speak different languages and know different domains, but the whole project team should be united around the problems that you’re trying to solve. That’s how you reach common understanding.
Don’t qualify your work
Inexperienced designers want everything to be perfect before they reveal it. When someone forces them to share, they qualify their presentation with statements like “This is still in the early stages…” or “I’m still working on this, but…”. That’s a bad habit that you need to grow out of eventually if you want to project confidence.
Good designers share work early and often. It’s the quickest way to find out what’s working and what isn’t. Your audience knows that the work isn’t final, because it’s only the third week of the project. Embrace that early stage where ideas are unrefined and bountiful.
You get better feedback when you share work-in-progress too. It’s a lot harder to criticize someone who has clearly spent the last week perfecting every last detail of the work they’re showing. You’ll get better results by welcoming people into your thinking and design process.
Embrace negative feedback
It’s important to let people in the room know that they’re allowed to get negative. Think about a time when you had to give some critical feedback to someone on your team. You know they spent a lot of time on the work, and you know they want it to be good. Emotions make it harder to say what really needs to be said.
The problem is that positive feedback doesn’t accomplish nearly as much as negative feedback. If something’s wrong, you need to know as soon as possible so you can make it right. Otherwise those mistakes will linger under the surface and re-appear at a time when they’re far more unmanageable.
Some clients don’t have great “bedside manner” and struggle with delivering their negative feedback in a constructive way. That can be hard to take, but you need to examine that harsh feedback with empathy and try to figure out what they’re really trying to say. People get worked up about things that are important to them, and you can use that anger as a way to identify the things that matter most to your client.
Talk about next steps
It’s important that everyone leaves the presentation feeling like there’s a plan. Talk about when you’re going to meet next, and what your team is going to work on between now and then. If you need something from the client, let them know and provide a deadline. Use the end of the meeting to make sure you’re still on the same page.
Seems like common sense, right? Unfortunately, common sense has a way of abandoning us when we need it the most. Much of formalized education ignores the fact that presentation skills are as important as anything else a person can learn to be successful in their chosen career. Just being aware of the things that I wrote about in this article will make your presentations better, and your true skill as a designer will be easier for the world to see.
