Sell your design to clients in 4 steps
I have been in many meetings to present designs to clients or stakeholders and realised how important it is to present designs effectively.
It doesn’t matter how good or bad your designs are. Your designs will not be approved if you do not engage with your audience and say what they want to hear. You might need to go back to your desk and pretend to change something to show stakeholders something different. Many of the designers I come across do not think that presenting is a skill that belongs to the design world. But I always remember the quote from Mike Monteiro — founder of Mule — who states, "A designer who does not present their work is not a designer”, and I couldn’t agree more.
Presenting to clients is not considered the most creative task and requires a more systematic approach. However, when I discussed this with my mentor Chris Myhill — Director of Experience at Pixel Fridge — he argued that presenting can be a creative task and should be considered a creative endeavour. Switching mindsets could be critical for designers, organising your ideas, and understanding the people in the room.
Thinking about people, we are all busy working across many different projects, and it’s essential to be mindful of that. Juggling other things, we try our best to achieve the goals that the business has set for us. At the same time, we are people and have personal goals. When we walk into a meeting room with many people around the table, we walk into a room with many personalities, problems, ambitions, and thoughts.
As UX designers, meetings are the best way to practice empathising with people. Think about the user, the business, and the individuals sitting there. Ask yourself, what does the user want/need? What does the business want/need? And how is my design helping them?
Golden rule
Nobody wants to hear you listing all the features and items you put in your designs.
I realise this is direct, but we can spend hours discussing fonts, page style or imagery as designers. I could spend hours investigating the journey a user can take on a website, and I love it! However, we are not all designers, and we are not all interested in the same things.
When you present your work to a client, you usually find yourself in a room with stakeholders who don’t know much about design and are only interested in fixing a problem, money and timelines. This can’t be further away from the creative world where we are most of the time.
During presentations, we have all seen designers explaining everything they have added on the screen. In his book Design is a Job, Mike Monteiro describes this as the Real estate tour.
He talks about how designers start from the top navigation and read all the items attentively. They go to the next thing on the page, telling everyone in the room about colours and fonts. This is a waste of time and a lost opportunity for designers to engage with stakeholders who hire us to do the work and require our help to reach their users.
Everyone in the room can see what you have done on the screen. What they do not know is why you have designed it that way.
Talk the talk
How do you make sure to engage stakeholders in a presentation? Think like a salesperson!
What I am saying might seem controversial, and that’s why I want to state right now that I do not mean that designers should become salespeople. But (and here is the but!) our job is not just to craft beautiful experiences for users. Our job is to identify business problems and create the right solutions for them. As part of this process, we must sell our ideas and convince clients or stakeholders that our designs do so. Therefore, we must learn to adjust our language and communicate to sell our designs.
We should put ourselves in the client’s shoes!
Reading Dale Carnegie's book ‘How to win friends and influence people’, I realised how important it is to change how I talk to ensure the best outcome from a meeting. In the book, Carnegie goes through many stories that allow you to understand the importance of looking at things from your listeners’ point of view. He also shows the difference it can make to the outcome and the conversation.
He provides an excellent example from Ft. Gerald S. Nirenberg, who says: “Cooperativeness in conversation is achieved when you show that you consider the other person’s ideas and feeling as important as your own. Starting your conversation by giving the other person the purpose or direction of your conversation, governing what you say by what you would want to hear if you were the listener, and accepting his or her viewpoint will encourage the listener to have an open mind to your ideas.”
He also says that if, as a result of reading the book, you get only one thing, that should be what Dean Donham of the Harvard business school says:
“I would rather walk the sidewalk in front of a person’s office for two hours before an interview than step into that office without a clear idea of what I was going to say and what that person — from my knowledge of his or her interests and motives — was likely to answer.”
In a nutshell, prepare as much as you can and think about selling your designs.
Organising my presentations is simple and includes extensive planning, and I bring a lot of empathy and confidence to the table.
1. Start with business aims and objectives
This is what the people in the room are most bothered about. Your work is based on a brief connected to business goals, so clearly state them. Reassure your audience that you haven’t just put pretty images on a screen but have analysed their goals, identified a problem and provided them with a solution. Connecting to your stakeholders and giving them a clear message that you know what they want is valuable, and your work reflects that.
Tip: sometimes, this is as simple as reiterating what has been written in the brief. I understand that business talk is not everyone’s favourite, but engaging your audience and having a conversation based on the same level of understanding is pivotal.
2. Talk about the users
Set the tone correctly and introduce who you are designing for. It’s not about what you or the business-like. It’s about the user and your job to clarify this. Sometimes projects don’t have the budget for user research, but you will have some data or idea of who you are designing for, so state this.
Tips: The first place to start is usually analytics to get a high-level understanding of your users and their journeys. Ask yourself where users are coming from. What are they trying to do? Is there any specific goal or need? My first call is usually Google Analytics. This is free, and most companies have it on their website. Look for what devices are most used by your users, landing pages, navigation patterns and keyword searches. Data is what makes your work objective rather than subjective. Even if this is a shallow view of your users, it sets the conversation to a different level.
3. Talk about the why (and not the what)
Explain the rationale behind your design. This is the time to show stakeholders that what you have done solves the problem and achieves their goals. Why have you chosen one colour more than another? Why is the photograph a certain way? What is the design trying to communicate?
Tips: Take your audience through your creative process and the steps you have followed to get to the design. You can also talk about competitor analysis, web standards and any other research you have conducted, or things you have considered as part of your designs.
4. Storytelling
The people in the room need to buy into what you are saying, and you need to take the conversation in the right direction to make this happen. I always enjoy seeing how great speakers manage to captivate the audience and make their message heard. I have admired people like Steve Jobs and Obama for their charisma and the simplicity and effectiveness of their speeches.
Tips: This interview of the Obama speechwriter David Litt highlights three simples steps to take on an excellent speech:
Make clear the why of what matters
Make it interesting
Make it memorable
What next?
Presenting your designs and ideas is difficult but integral to every designer’s job. So:
Organise your thoughts well and plan for every eventuality
Rehearse (even if just in your mind) what you are going to say
Think about questions that clients may have and how you are going to answer
Prepare any file you need for the presentation and documents you may want to print and distribute
Build up your confidence
Practice makes it perfect, as says my friend Chris in his article.