How to Start Building Presentation Skills
Experience design is still a young and dynamically developing profession. Various online media resources release a lot of useful materials about design practice. We can solve business problems faster and more efficiently if we develop our hard skills by reading those articles. This is definitely helpful in our everyday work. However, hard skills are just one side of the coin. We need to tell a story to our stakeholders about how our design solved a particular issue. This is where soft skills come into the game.
For instance, imagine a meeting where we need to talk about finished work. We might start by sharing our screen, abruptly zoom-in to an artboard with a number 1, abruptly zoom-out, and then again zoom-in to another artboard with a number 2. At the same time, please don’t forget, our design is subjective. It can be hard to formalize why we came up with our decisions. Our trained intuition, well-trained eye, and theoretical base often tell us how to do design right. The dilemma is that our knowledge is available only to us. People who attend meetings are often not designers. They probably don’t know a lot about design, and before your meeting they were likely busy with their own tasks and problems.
In this article, I collect a few frameworks that can help us be better prepared for meetings and improve the quality of our communication. To begin, I would like to jump to ancient Greece, where Plato compared philosophy to medicine. Drawing inspiration from Plato, it seems to me that we can also compare experience design to medicine. After exploring these ideas, I will turn toward some specific examples that apply these principles to real-life design communication situations.
So, what is medicine? Plato says that medicine is an art that consists of a situation, a chance, and an assumption. By analyzing the causes, you can diagnose the disease, predict its development and, based on this evaluation, choose the appropriate treatment. But medicine is also the art of dialogue and persuasion. A good doctor is one who is able to convince the patient to cure the disease.
The same is true with experience design. We need to know how to diagnose the problem, understand which solution can fix it, and convince the team that it is worth fixing. To achieve this, we need to develop a style of speech that is convincing yet collaborative. Protesting, disputing, shouting, and anger are not philosophy or experience design. Our speech can be modest or even persistent, but it needs to speak the same language as the business we are serving.
It seems to me that this is the difference between a less experienced designer and a more experienced one. A mature designer can not only solve a design or a business problem but can also adequately tell a story about how his or her design solved that problem.
When we are busy with solving something, our consciousness refers us to our mental model. Each person has a mental model that perceives and conveys information. This model is a kind of map that represents our knowledge and helps us organize the complexities of what we do into recognizable patterns. These days, Elon Musk’s company Neuralink is developing implantable brain–machine interfaces. In the imminent future, we will be able to transfer information from our mental model to that of another by using this technology. This will greatly speed up the process of communication. Until we can use Neuralink, however, it is still important to know how to convey complex concepts through words.
To this end, I would like to return to Plato. He identifies five elements of cognition. For now, we will focus on the first three (and return to the last two at the end of this article). These are: name, definition (definition includes nouns and verbs), and image. To illustrate these elements, let’s take a “circle” as our example. The name “circle” used to define a circle is completely independent of the circle itself, or at least extraneous to it. Likewise, a definition based on nouns and verbs is also extraneous to the circle in itself. Even a picture of a circle is extraneous to the circle. Joseph Kosuth, an American conceptual artist, demonstrates this idea in his 1965 work, “One and Three Chairs.” In this work, we imagine that we might have a casual conversation about an ordinary wooden chair. Simultaneously, each participants’ mental model will project its own form of this ordinary wooden chair. In short, our mental model of the chair is not identical to the chair in itself.
This emphasizes the challenge of conveying the value of experience design to our interlocutor, which necessarily involves a translation from our mental model to theirs. We must show what experience design is, the difficulties it entails, and how much effort it requires, so that non-designers can more fully understand the process behind our choices. By doing this, we earn their trust because they will more clearly understand why we came to our decisions.
In 2017, Stefan Sagmeister came to Kyiv to give a lecture in the KAMA. Pavel Vrzheshch, creative director of the advertising agency Banda, asked Stefan Sagmeister, “Look, there are so many cool designers in the world, but people only know a couple of names. Why do you think you managed to become such a superstar, so famous? What helped you”? Sagmeister responded, “You know, I’m very good at selling. My first boss was Italian and an incredibly talented salesperson, and I constantly learned this from him. It helped me build my entire career”.
“No matter what you do, your job is to tell a story. There are a lot of reasons why it’s so effective. First of all, it engages the audience and builds trust,” says Gary Vaynerchuk.
Because design is subjective, we can solve a business problem in different ways. Yet if a designer can clearly communicate why he or she is offering their solution and can “sell” it, they will be more successful in the labor market. Designers are in high demand, and the ability to communicate well can be a major advantage.
So, how do we do this? Let’s consider a practical place to start. Tom Greever, the author of “Articulating Design Decisions,” advises us to write our own ideas down about what we do on paper. By doing that, you learn how to convince yourself with your decisions. And it teaches you how to be prepared for questions.
The next step is to form your answers with models like STAR (Situation, Tasks, Actions, Results), CAR (Challenge, Action, Result), and CIGAR (Current Situation, Ideal Situation, Gap Between Current Situation and Ideal Situation, Action and Overview). You can read more about these techniques here. Alastair Simpson, VP of Design at Dropbox, wrote about a similar approach in his article.
To conclude, I want to return once again to Plato and his last two elements of cognition. The fourth element is what we call knowledge and it exists only in the soul. It knows the quality of a thing. However, it does not know the very existence of a thing. Only the fifth form of cognition, nous, allows one to cognize a thing in its very essence. Nous is present in each of the other four elements of cognition. It can be formed by walking back and forth, ascending and descending from one to another stage of cognition. Ascending from name to definition, descending and ascending again, we will progressively grasp the very essence of those things that we want to know.
And when the designer has done this slow, long, difficult work of ascending and descending from one form of cognition to another, knowledge of reality becomes possible. For Plato, this knowledge is gained through a process of “friction” arising through training and exercise. Like fire produced from the constant rubbing of sticks, nous is created through the constant movement of one form of cognition between another. Nous is acquired only through practice, through our constant exercising of the four elements of cognition.
It doesn’t matter which technique you choose, the main thing is to start practicing and to improve yourself with new skills on the way to your best.
