How many designers start presentations off on the back foot
How to avoid getting your design ideas rejected before the meeting starts.
“Design doesn’t necessarily always have a value problem. They have a translation problem. We do valuable work. But when we explain it to executives, we explain it like they’re a designer.” -Venessa Bennett, Global UX Director
Many times, designers walk into presentations and are already on the back foot. Why? Designers often believe they are merely presenting information.
You’re not. When you present something, whether it’s user testing findings, design recommendations, or more, it’s about getting people to make decisions and determine the best course of action.
And if you keep getting shot down in the first few minutes, you’re probably presenting it like a used car salesman.
Understanding what’s at stake: modern vs traditional car buying
Imagine that you are going to a car dealership to purchase a new car. You go to a dealership, they show you a few models and colors, and then say, “Okay, would you like to buy this now?”
That’s essentially what designers often do when presenting ideas for change. You’re asking people to make substantial monetary decisions, often involving tens of thousands of dollars, in a matter of minutes.
What they decide, in the moment, might cost weeks of everyone’s time, salary, and other resources, and they don’t know all the details.
This is known as information asymmetry, and it’s how Daniel Pink, author of To Sell is Human, describes the old model of car buying.
People would walk into a car dealer knowing nothing, hoping not to get ripped off, while the dealer knew everything from safety rating to market price.
But people don’t buy cars like that anymore: all that information is at their fingertips.
They’ll go online and check user reviews, car safety ratings, and competitor pricing with the click of a button. They’re well-prepared by the time they step into the dealership, which helps them feel comfortable with a purchase they’ve already scoped out.
So why does your design presentation feel like the old model of buying cars? That’s what you need to fix, or else you’re asking them to spend tens of thousands of dollars on something they’ve heard five minutes ago.
But that doesn’t mean an incredibly detailed presentation. It means doing the prep work before the meeting.
UX Meetings should not be a surprise
The mistake many designers make is saying, “I want to present about what I found through user testing.”
While that might be a factual statement, that’s also a black box. Your audience doesn’t know if you’re going to say, “Hey, everything was mostly good,” or “Stop everything, it was horrible and we need to change things.”
So, one of the first things that you need to do is remove the mystery about what the user findings are.
There are two recommended ways to do this:
Create an agenda:
One of the simplest ways to do this is to create an agenda to go along with the meeting.
Something as simple as “This meeting is about talking about X, Y, Z, points that got raised during user testing” can help the audience come into the meeting more prepared to think about and talk about those specific points.
Create an executive summary/preliminary results:
The other approach I’ve taken in the past is to create a “preliminary executive summary”, where we discuss a few key findings and our recommendations ahead of time in a 1-page document.
This helps change the nature of the meeting from “UX is presenting their findings” to “Let’s discuss the evidence around ‘Re-designing the Checkout process’ and whether it’s a good idea.”
But prepping information is only part of the equation.
Understand who your audience is, instead of a generic person
“If you can spend time with that stakeholder ahead of time and learn what’s motivating them, you can prep for that eventual curveball they will try to throw you.” -Jonathan Coen, Director of UX
This is one of the most common mistakes designers make, especially during their preparations.
Your audience is not designers who have:
Spent the same amount of time talking with users
Seen all the various ways users interact with our product
Spent weeks analyzing the data
etc.
That much should be obvious, but many design presentations are created as if you’re presenting to a bunch of insiders.
Who is the decisionmaker, and what are you trying to get them to do? Thinking about that simple decision helps you give a bit of necessary context for what you should be preparing for.
Especially when it comes to priorities.
Understand priority, a common designer weakness
Designers often struggle with prioritizing tasks, which is a key lesson many designers must learn in the industry.
You will never have the resources to tackle everything, which means you must prioritize. For example, if designers have 20 user findings and classify 10 of them as critical priority, that essentially means nothing.
From a usability perspective, all these things might be bad usability issues, but what many decision-makers need to know is very simple:
If we only have resources to do three things this Sprint, which are the top three things that we should focus on?
That is at the heart of what many decision-makers are looking for when it comes to what we present. If we can address that issue? We can have a much larger impact.
Don’t get shot down by only thinking about the meeting
One thing you must realize is that many decisions aren’t made in the meeting itself.
On some level, it makes sense: how could someone see an important multimillion-dollar decision and make that critical decision in five minutes?
Sometimes, these meetings are just about making ideas official, after executives have thought about the issue for hours.
While designers may not be part of those ‘backroom conversations’ that happen before the meeting, not doing enough prep work is often why your design recommendations get shot down.
This is why taking the time to prepare and spending a little bit of time understanding your audience is crucial. Very few people are going to buy a car (or spend ten thousand dollars on projects) after five minutes of review.
But once you’ve provided enough context to make the decision as easy as possible? Then, your team might make that decision more easily.
Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and Data and Design newsletter Author. He teaches a course, Data Informed Design: How to Show The Strategic Impact of Design Work, which helps designers communicate their value and get buy-in for ideas.