Wearing the title of the Head of Design, I kept saying to the team that:

Don’t show me the design.

There have been too many cases that we have someone on the stage, talking about the layouts, the buttons, the interactions, etc. and the audiences are just sitting there, asking simple questions like why this color is red and why that button is rectangular. At the end of the day, everyone seems to be “aligned” and we shall start to execute the project.

Are we really aligned?

As a presenter, are you really presenting the design in the proper way? If your audience is not asking questions, are they really not having any questions, or they simply don’t know what questions to ask?

As an audience, have you really understood the full picture? Are you really not having any more questions or simply you don’t want yourself to look stupid by asking “stupid” questions?

Design doesn’t matter, solving the problems matters.

Sketch and Figma are great design tools to allow designers to explore different design variations. However, it is an open canvas with no starting nor ending points. If you have to open your design file during a presentation and keep zooming in and out, it is very easy for your audience to lose track. They might not be able to follow you all along.

Instead of opening up your deisgn files. Let’s first of all make sure that everyone is aware of why we are here, what the problems we are trying to solve, and how is this design going to solve the problems.

No matter how complicated the design is, you need to find a linear path. Make a good story of the WHY, WHO, WHAT questions (link) and craft your narratives.

Stop leaning toward personal opinions that you might hear from your boss. Lead the feedback loop and guide people focusing on the most important parts. Get feedback about how well this is solving the problems and then which parts could be improved.

Back up your story with solid design principles as well as real user feedback. Plan and run user testing as early and as much as possible to verify your design proposals. After all, The “U” in “UX”, “UI” stands for user.

You don’t have to make everything perfect. You might be asked challenging questions during a design presentation. It is okay that we don’t have answers for everything. What’s important is that we always have a plan to get all the answers.

Don’t show me the design, show me the solution.