Presenting and defending your designs

Design reviews are critical part of every UX designers day to day life. We sell our design day in and day out to peers, stakeholders and leaders. We present, we defend, we accept feedbacks and sometime we pushback. Some days we feel great about our design review meetings, some days we feel ripped off.  

Every UX designer out there can relate to this problem and might have found a solution which works for them.  Through this post I want to present few strategies which helped me personally. 

1. Get to know your audience 

Leader or stakeholders don't have lot of time to go through each and every detail about your design, they are more interested in the right design solution. They can't have multiple frequent iterations with you on every small detail or ask. One important thing to remember is that every leader is different and their approach is different. Hence if we know our target audiences, design reviews becomes fruitful.

Getting to know your audience really helps you drive the conversation in the right direction. If you know your audiences, their approach and their way of thinking, it will help you to prepare your story along those lines.

Long time back, I worked with a PM who would nitpick every minute things in the design including spacings, margin, alignments, contrast, icon and color choices even to the extent of questioning UI patterns usage. During my first interaction with him I wasn't aware of his style of working so the review session wasn't very exciting as I would have wanted it to be. Had I known about him, I would have ensured having proper reasoning for my icon designs and would have made my design bullet proof.

I later adopted the process of knowing my audience so that my design elevates those thoughts and I am not ripped off for those minute design details. 

There was another PM who would question everything in design. Have you thought about this use case? Have you though about that use case? How about edge case? how about the end to end flow?

Its weird as a UX designer to say "oh ya, I haven't thought of that use case. Let me make a note of it for the next review". 

Knowing his approach helped me because I would have my presentation aligned to his approach based on the anticipated questions, so the back and forth iterations were less. That also demonstrates how prepared you are. 

 In a nutshell - do ample research about your stakeholders ahead of time so that you are not put on spot during your design reviews. Know their approach, know their style of working, know if they are too nit picky, know if they ask too many questions, know if they go off topic always and know everything that would help you. Knowing these things would surely prepare you well.

2. Agenda 

Always have an agenda charted out, this will help you focus on your presentation and get the most out of it. A well planned agenda is always well executed, because chances of deviating from it would be rare. 

Also as I mentioned earlier leaders and stakeholders have time constraints so having a well planned agenda would give them advance heads up as to what to expect from the review session and the corresponding actions items.

Having a well planned agenda will also help you to create your UX storytelling along those points plus will give you base to practice and prepare.

I personally realized that having an agenda helped my design thinking and also helped driving the conversations strategically without deviating too much off the topics. 

3. Practice

Yes you read it right! Practice, practice and practice.

"Practice makes a man perfect". Sure it does.

 We work on tight deadlines and have so many things to do, when and how will we practice? There are many ways you could do that and practicing sometimes works as a retrospective which can help you prepare well and avoid any unexpected situations.  

If you have a friend or colleague who could spare some time, present them your designs. Sometimes people who don't know the context of your product could be your best critique and can bring points you may want to think about. We do a lot of internal design critique sessions within teams and it helps fine-tuning the designs.

My mentor says, "if you don't have any audience to practice, stand in front of the mirror and practice your session". Sometimes I get very conscious by doing so, but it sure does boost my confidence. No matter how much I screw up during my mirror practice session, but when I face my actual audience my script would be solid and design review goes smooth. 

4. Prepare

I would say if you have to talk a lot during design reviews trying to justify your points and ideas, you are failing as a UX designer. 

A successful design review is the one where your designs and presentation does most of the talking. Ensure your design speaks for you.  

• Think about all the use cases (normal and edge cases) for your design and have them in your presentation
• Have your recommended design ready with strong reasoning.  Prepare for counter arguments for your recommendation and have your points ready to defend them in a subtle manner
• Have your alternative designs ready to show what all options you tried and why you chose what you recommend
• Also have any data points you have to back up your design ready to make your recommendation stronger

Preparing you design with all the above points would ensure that your design speaks for you and you are doing less talking.  

PS: I would be interested to know what worked for you as a UX designer.