Tip #1- Tell the Story

If there is one thing that you take away from this post, it is to TELL A STORY. With every presentation or meeting, create your design process into a story because this will not only help your audience to visualize your process but it will keep them engaged! Remember: your goal for these presentations and meetings is to inform the decisions you make based on the research and users — clients/stakeholders will want to see the data or evidence to ensure your decisions will bring revenue. Engaging them is the step to informing them. An easy yet effective approach to this is creating a powerpoint. Whether it’s Google Slides, Keynote, etc., be sure to keep it interesting.

So, how to tell the story? It’s simple. Write out an outline and build it from there. Tell your process from beginning to end, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to include every detail or tell it in order. Include information that is meaningful and leads well into your next steps and design.

If you’re working in a team with other UX Designers, a good approach is to have everyone brainstorm their own outline and come together to collaborate on a final outline. Even though you and your team went through the same process, everyone may have their own interpretation on how to tell the story.

Tip #2- Short and Sweet

Time is money for clients/stakeholders, so keep your presentations to 15 minutes or less. If you have a presentation that is beyond that, your client/stakeholder will probably not listen. Therefore, include the most important and meaningful information that tells the story. When I mean most important and meaningful information, I mean the results and data. Clients/stakeholders are less interested in the details of a process, but what you were able to get out of it. If you need to explain the process, keep it to one to two sentences and move on.

So, how to keep your presentations to 15 minutes or less? Practice. Practice. Practice. Whether it’s by yourself or with a team, practice and take note of how long it takes to finish the presentation from start to finish. I always like to include a 1–2 minute filler time to account for technical difficulties or anything that may unexpectedly arise during the presentation.

Tip #3- Progressive Disclosure

Progressive disclosure is revealing information progressive on the presentation slides, as you talk about the points. In order to do this, you can add transitions or animations. This is important because it helps your client/stakeholders to digest what you are saying quickly and efficiently. If you reveal all of your points and information on the slide at once, they will not know how to read everything at once. This results to them not being engaged with what you’re saying! (Notice how everything points back to engagement?) So, reveal the corresponding information on the slide with your speaking points.

I wouldn’t add transitions or animations to every single slide because this may cause a lag and can be sloppy. Use these transitions or animations when there are many points or a lot of information.

Tip #4- Aesthetic

Yes, you are a user experience researcher, but you are still a designer, so live up to that! Keep your PowerPoints simple, clean, and aesthetic! A good approach to this is to have your slide background white and include 1 color to add more liveliness. Try to stray anything that it is too vivid or vibrant — you want to keep it fun, not blind your audience. You can also include little animations or graphics, as well. Again, don’t add too much where it becomes distracting and cluttered.

When it comes to what to include on a slide, use as little words as you can. The last thing that your audience wants to see on a slide is a paragraph. They will read it and not pay attention to what you’re saying, or they will just not read it at all. So, include short and concise points.

You can even replace words with pictures. Use pictures that are meaningful and relevant. Also, use pictures that are high quality and not pixilated. A good rule of thumb that I have remembered when it came to including pictures is to make sure you can read and see everything clearly. If you can’t, your audience can’t, and it would not be meaningful at all.

Tip #5- The Small Details

Don’t worry, I’m almost done. These small details are things that I have learned to make your presentations more seamless and put together.

1. Number your slides. Even though it may seem like it doesn’t add much value, it really does. Even your audience has a question about something they can quickly refer to the slide by the number, instead of having to recall what they slide may have looked like. This will just make everybody’s life a little bit easier.
2. Begin your presentation with a ‘Meet the Team’ page. Have a picture of yourself and your team members with your names. This is particularly helpful when you are meeting your client for the first time or if you rarely meet your client/stakeholder; they’ll know who is who right off the bat. Remember: make sure the pictures are high-quality and not pixelated. I would use a professional profile picture, or your picture on Linkedin. A bonus for a first client/stakeholder meeting is to include an ice-breaker question in this section!
3. Before you go into the meat of the presentation, include a slide that outlines the agenda of the entire powerpoint. This will just give your audience a taste of what they’ll be hearing from you and to align themselves better for the meeting.
4. After you finish presenting your findings, conclude with a Q & A session (and have a slide that says so, so that your audience knows it’s Q & A time). If anything needs to be clarified, this will be the time for your audience to get the clarification.
5. At the very end of your presentation, include a slide that has all of your team members’ name and email, or point of contact. This wraps everything up nicely and allows your audience to get in contact with you if they need to.
6. After the meeting, create a PDF of your powerpoint and email it to your client/stakeholder. They may want a copy to forward it to someone else on the team or for their own reference. It’s also just a small and thoughtful gesture that you can do easily.

Tip #6- Be enthusiastic

This is your time. This is your time to show-off the work you did and represent your users, so be excited! Giving presentations can be difficult and nerve-wrecking, but it becomes easier when you master the basics of presenting in front of an audience. Good luck and happy presenting!

Many designers still don’t see the utter importance of annotating and documenting because they believe their materials and research will explain it in whole; however, THIS IS NOT THE CASE. Just from the materials and research you will not understand why they made certain decisions, what their goals were, and what are some missing pieces.

One of the best things that you can annotate before handing off your materials are your wireframes! Your wireframes pulls together the research, the testing, and the decisions that were made, and it’s all in one place. I’m going to dive in on how to annotate wireframes from start to finish, and make your lives, as well as your next team’s lives, easier.

Step 1- Choosing your Wireframes

Sometimes, you don’t need to annotate all of your wireframes. It can be very time consuming and repetitive. A good rule of thumb when choosing wireframes is looking at if features are unique, specific, and detailed. If the feature(s) fits into these 3 categories, it’ll be difficult to explain entirely its function just through wireframes. Therefore, these features are on the top priority of annotating.

Of course, if you have doubts about what to annotate, annotate it. Explain as much as you can in much detail so that there’s no confusion and the person reading does NOT make any assumptions. Assumptions are a big no-no.

Step 2- Who to Write To

When annotating there will be most likely 4 teams you will need to write for: the next UX Design Team, the UI Design Team, the Developers, and Stakeholders/Clients.

There will be a lot of writing and can be overwhelming for these teams, so a good tip is to color code each team. Be sure to add a key on the front cover so that they know automatically which color to look for! This will make things very efficient and cause less confusion for everyone.

Step 3- What to Write

Depending on the team, what you annotate will be very different. I will go into some high-level things that can be included in your annotations.

For the UX Design Team, you will touch base on the reasoning behind the design decision, research and testing results to corroborate decisions, and/or areas for further research and testing for that team. You can also include references or refer them to research that might explain the decision in more detail. Ultimately, you are sharing the reasoning behind design decisions.

For the UI Design Team, it is very similar to the UX Design team, but more related to the way it looks. It doesn’t need instructions on what it should look like, but can be directions to how it could look like. However, again, you should be sharing the reasoning behind a certain color or style based on your research and testings.

For the Developers, you will be focusing on the functionality of the elements. The interactions, the animations, and the data needed should be clearly explained. Most developers don’t need to understand the reasoning, but just need to understand how you want it to look and function.

For the Stakeholders/Client, they don’t want to know anything except for how it will increase revenue (serious but not that serious). Annotate the important and fundamental elements in the product. They just want to understand how it will increase sales and be worth their investments

In short, these are the things that you should include in your annotations. Of course, it’s up to your discretion on what to include, but be sure to be as detailed as you can. Again, don’t make the teams assume what you are trying to say.

Step 4- Designing it

Even though you may be a user experience designer and not a graphic designer, you are still a designer. Make it neat and presentable! No one wants to read something that is messy and unorganized. It’s also an annotation so mark it up and clearly indicate what you are referring to and who it is for.

There are plug-ins on Figma and Sketch that have great templates just for wireframe annotations. There is also a feature on InVision, however, I do not recommend it because when you print it, it does not turn out neat and organized. You can also design it yourself.

In conclusion, be clear, neat, and don’t have your readers assume anything! You want the transition from one team to another as seamless as possible. Cheers!

My team and I spent a good chunk of the day just trying to figure out which ideation activity we needed to do, but, in all honesty, we were ready to just fall back on something familiar which was Brainwriting or Sketchstorming. To us, we knew the process and it was faster to just do something that we were familiar with. However, the design gods knew we were not taking the best direction. At the last minute, we came across ‘How Might We’ and the ‘Mash-up Method’ and decided to do these activities — it turned out to be one of the more successful ideation session that I was ever a part of.

I’ll first explain what these two methods are and why it ended up being the perfect pair.

What is ‘How Might We’ and the ‘Mash-up Method’?

First, you need your problem statement or the area of opportunity that you are solving for. Then, reframe these insight statements into ‘How might we…’ questions. Reframing it into questions encourage designers to look for and think of many opportunities for design. The format also suggests on how the problem space can be approached in different ways. Keep in mind that this method does not imply there is a particular solution to each question, but it guides designers to innovative thinking. The questions should also be narrow enough to jumpstart the brainstorming.

The concept of the “Mash-up Method’ is quite simple and the name does a good job of explaining what this activity is. In this activity, you take two seemingly random things (brands, products, experiences, services, etc) ‘mash’ them together to brainstorm new innovations.

And so…

You’re probably thinking so what? but think about it: ‘How Might We’ leads perfectly into the ‘Mash-up Method’. ‘How Might We’ breaks down the problem space into different approaches and the ‘Mash-up Method’ provides the possible solutions. When you have innovative thinking with innovative brainstorming, you create innovative solutions. This is exactly what the outcome should be with ideation activities.

“When you have innovative thinking with innovative brainstorming, you create innovative solutions”

This pairing is not a formula and does not need to be followed for every ideation session. However, the moral of the story is to always maximize your ideation sessions. You can create great things through that.