Giving Effective Presentations as a Designer
Think like a designer, present insights and focus on clarity.
Includes notes from Lea Pica, a seasoned presentation and visualization speaker
Everyone has sat through a bad presentation. As an audience member, you might feel bored, confused and like you’ve wasted time. And as the presenter, you might struggle to get the response or action that you had hoped. Whether its poor preparation, a dense and unreadable slide deck or incomprehensible charts, being on either side of a bad presentation is unfortunate.
You’d think as designers, we would be comfortable putting together a slide deck and making a decent presentation without too much effort. However, not everyone is equipped with the skills to give effective presentations. There are more nuances to presentation that go beyond being able to make a slide look great.
The reality is, despite however much effort you put into gathering data, facts and assets for your next meeting — poor presentation can kill perfectly good content and ideas.
And while many of us that went through design school are comfortable with design critique, the environment of work puts us in a situation where we may be presenting to a completely different audience. Rather than presenting work in front of other designers, you may be presenting ideas to folks who:
- Aren’t designers
- Aren’t familiar with design process
- Don’t know or misunderstand the role of designers
The importance of clearly communicating your design work to stakeholders is undervalued as a part of design education. After all, if designers aren’t able to present work well, our role as designers is hindered. We need to communicate the value of our design work, collaborate with other disciplines and advocate for design in this process.
Here’s some tips for giving effective presentations:
1. Know your audience
Similar to mindset to a designer with user empathy, whenever you make a presentation, you must first consider your audience. What are their unspoken needs? What do they actually need from you?
2. Repetition is your friend
Repetition helps information stay with your audience. Restating of the original idea can promote clarity and help emphasize important points (ex. your takeaway or key message).
Again, this goes back to #1. Know your audience. If our audience is distracted or unfamiliar with our work, this makes repetition a helpful aid to direct attention to our main point.
3. Insight vs. data
When you present a piece of information, it should be in “insight” form rather than just “data”. A data is any standalone statement (ex. usage data in the last month = x). Insights help to explain why and what is a relevant next step regarding this piece of data.
Insight = data + your perspective/possible next step
4. Your slides are for your audience
Most people just read off their slides rather than prepare. Try to use a conversational tone rather than reading off slides.
Your slides should be for your audience, not for you to read off your notes.
If you have details, you can create a set of notes for yourself or share the document with the team afterwards.
5. Avoid the trench coat method
Avoid exposing all the information you plan to share at one time (ex. a slide with all text, and no visuals).
Don’t just flash all your information at once, but present it progressively as a part of your narrative.
6. Focus on clarity (rather than slide count)
Having one main idea per slide keeps content digestible .Think less about the total number of slides you have and focus on keeping a slide clear (having one main idea per slide).
Remember to use relevant, high quality visuals (non-stock images) to illustrate your point. Use masks/gradients to direct attention to a point if you have a list.
7. Goal: Get them to remember and act afterwards
Relevant visuals and storytelling can help humanize information and make it more memorable so your audience will take action. Don’t just show data, provide ways to give it context and meaning.
Consider these questions:
What do you want your audience to takeaway from the presentation?
What are the next steps?
How do you inspire them to want to (and remember to) take action?
The next time you need to make a presentation, remember to think like a designer (consider your audience), direct your audience’s attention through simple slides and make your message memorable.
Learn more
Did you find this useful? Buy me a coffee to give my brain a hug. 🍵
Feel free to check out my design work or my handbook on UX design, upgrading your portfolio and understanding design thinking.
