How to Effectively Present Your Work With Impact to Various Audiences
Written by: David Picarazzi | Product Designer @ TribalScale
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Presenting stakeholders to designs is often an afterthought on becoming a Product Designer, UX Designer, or UI Designer. The chances are that you were taught about design methods at school or via an online course, but you didn’t learn that presentation would be a challenge in the real world. I often tell this to newer Designers — it’s just not something you’re taught, but you should be. In fact, I encourage all Designers to reach out to newcomers or professionals on the matter. I’ll be telling you my thoughts and what has worked in my experience.
What Makes a Good Design?
If you ask a Designer what makes a good design, you’d probably get a different answer from each person you ask. No matter how it’s answered, it all consolidates into these 3 factors:
- It’s easy to use
- It’s accepted by stakeholders and users
- It solves a problem
If nothing else, the last point is the most important. When designing, your solution should at the very least, solve a problem. After all, that’s what user experience is about. The problems to solve are always expressed by internal or external stakeholders. They may be in the form of a KPI (key performance indicator) or frequent user feature requests perhaps. If you’ve recognized the problem and created a solution, you’re about halfway there. Now, you just need a way to communicate why what you did is the best solution. Before getting into the framework, you’re going to want to familiarize yourself with your Design. Remember not to fall in love with it. There are 3 questions you should ask yourself that will help you defend and describe your designs:
3 Questions to Ask Yourself to Familiarize Yourself With Your Design
You want to emerge victorious when communicating with people about your designs. Ask yourself these 3 questions about your designs to help you prepare for a presentation:
- What problem does my design solve?
- How will my design impact the user?
- How is it better than the alternative?
You’ll hear every Designer talk about how design is about solving problems. It is. Always start with the problems at hand and the goals you want to achieve with your design. Hit them at the heart. Simply present your designs in the order of priority for the problems the business is facing. That could be: We want to let all of our users know about our new pro features available as an upsell.
Always keep in mind your target user on the other side. They’re the audience who will actually be using your product. Take for example, an application for doctors to create orders for prescription medication that can be delivered. You may find that the majority of the doctors using the app are older. Since they’re older, you may opt for user-interface controls that don’t hide behind menus.
As you’re creating different versions of a solution, remember effort+impact. Why did you design each solution the way you did and why is the one that you’re presenting better than those versions? Is it easier to develop? Is it harder to develop but would prove a better user-experience?
These are the 3 questions you should be asking yourself for every design you make. There is a framework worth mentioning that can really help you put it all together into practice. Answering this framework will help you breeze through stakeholder meetings. It’s called The IDEAL Framework. This framework comes from the book ‘Articulating Design Decisions’ by Tom Greever and is a cornerstone book for navigating stakeholders and defending your designs.
The IDEAL Framework
Every response needs to hit on a number of areas in order for you to make a compelling case. This is where The IDEAL Framework comes into play:
Identify the problem
Begin by addressing the problem that your design solves.
Describe your solution
Connect your design to the problem. How does it address the problem?
Empathize with the user
Stakeholders the majority of the time forget about the people who will be using our product. As Designers, we represent them. How does your design solve the problem for the specific target audience?
Appeal to the business
Stakeholders like data and numbers. Describe how your design is meant to target key performance indicators (KPIs). If there isn’t a sole KPI, use your best guess to think about what could be one. For a new application, a KPI could be the number of users that convert to signing up with your product or service. Is your onboarding process a quick one?
Lock in agreement
After hitting on the above, directly ask your stakeholders “Do you agree with the solution?” This clearly helps get a yes or no to move forward with your design. Asking that question to yourself even feels stomach-churning, but remember that we don’t have forever and unless they disagree with your design, you’ll keep pressing on with it.
Let’s Put it Into Practice
Identify the problem
“You mentioned that you’d like the ability to customize each report directly on the view of the graph itself. I agree that would be a great addition to the app.”
Describe your solution
“We purposefully left out this idea because it wasn’t within our scope for this phase of the project. The concept requires adding quite a bit of functionality and design effort to really implement it well.”
Empathize with the user
“We understand that although this feature would be useful for some users, the majority of people using the application do not require this level of customization. We’ve tested the feature with current users and the majority of users did not reach for it.”
Appeal to the business
“If we stay focused on finishing the case view in its simplest form as is, we’ll be able to complete this core feature set within our time-line and get this view to users sooner. Afterward, we can collect additional feedback from users and make a plan to implement your idea.”
Lock in agreement
“Are you comfortable with us moving forward without that feature for now? Or would you prefer we reprioritize our tasks and adjust our timelines to accommodate this feature?”
Final Thoughts
With The IDEAL Framework, you will be able to navigate any stakeholder meeting with ease. You can either make a slide deck presentation with the abbreviation and your designs or solely present your designs while purely talking through them via The IDEAL Framework.
Stakeholders often don’t know how to communicate with designers when they have feedback or suggestions. When that happens, there are questions you can ask to help them get the words out too. We’ll save that for another time, however. If you’re fascinated with the art of communicating with stakeholders, I recommend you buy Tom Greever’s Articulating Design Decisions. In this book, Tom goes over a lot of realistic scenarios you will find yourself in during your day-to-day job, and how you can be ready.
David Picarazzi is a Product Designer at TribalScale, he defends and represents target users by designing according to their needs. Keen on proving the value of UX to stakeholders, he leverages business needs and turns them into tangible solutions. A fun fact about David? He has red hair and black eyebrows.
TribalScale is a global innovation firm that helps enterprises adapt and thrive in the digital era. We transform teams and processes, build best-in-class digital products, and create disruptive startups. Learn more about us on our website. Connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn & Facebook!
