The work doesn’t speak for itself

Doing “good work” is not enough — why and how to share your work as a designer.

As designers we often talk about the importance of doing good work. But what about talking about that work? It’s easy to share a polished design or prototype and assume our audience will see the intention and thought behind every carefully placed pixel — unlikely. If not a hundred times already, at some point in your career as a designer you will receive feedback at is totally irrelevant and unhelpful.

An executive sees a low-fidelity wireframe for the first time and tells you how much they love the “clean and minimal” new concept, when you just want to know if the IA effectively captures their product offering from an internal org perspective. Perhaps it is a well-intentioned fellow designer offering truly helpful feedback on the shade of grey in a paragraph font, when what you need to know is if the content of that paragraph is effectively communicating the right information to the end user.

Experience design doesn’t start with an app or website, or even with an end user. Design starts with businesses. Businesses made of stakeholders with different agendas, concerns and valuable input to bring to the table.

Engage stakeholders early in the design process.

Bringing in stakeholders — internal or external — early in your process helps get ahead of any potential issues. Proactive conversations help stakeholders feel involved, heard, and gives them context for seeing work in later stages of the process. Personally, I love a “pre-post mortem” conversation. I’ll ask questions like:

• What might cause this project to fail?
• What do you think might go wrong?
• What does success look like?
• How does this product/feature serve the greater business goals?
• What worries you about this project?

Opening up these conversations before getting deep into the design process helps avoid issues later on.

Set context when sharing design.

When sharing a design, start by communicating the overall goal and context. Your audience should understand why this work is important to the business and end user. When talking about your work, consider how you can answer the following questions:

• What problem is this design solving?
• Why does it matter to your audience?
• What other options have you explored?
• What do end users think?

You can tell your stakeholders a story — remind them how you got to where you are today and why it matters to them.

Set stakeholders up for success.

After sharing how you got there, let your audience know where you need to go. Communicate what feedback you need from your stakeholders in that moment, and give them ideas on how they can help provide that feedback. Are you looking for critique on a specific design component? Consensus on how a small feature fits into a larger product strategy? Ideation on a color scheme? Before sharing work tell your audience the feedback you want and need from them — and be specific.

Everything is subjective– what you see is not what you get. A group of people can look at the same data, set of facts, or in this scenario — design — and have totally different perspectives. As designers sharing subjective work, we have the responsibility to guide our stakeholders through the experiences we are designing — helping them understand how to work with us to get a design across the finish line.

The quality of our work can often speak for itself, but design needs to be presented in the same way it was created — with care and intention.