Why you should always rehearse User Flows and/or Prototypes, and obviously your presentation
So you’ve been working on a user flow and you think you know everything about the product that you’re working on. But when you present it to the stakeholders, questions start to arise about the product or project and you don’t have the answers. You feel your body temperature rising as your heart starts racing faster and faster: the first thing that comes screaming into your mind is — how the hell, didn’t I think about that?
Before I started rehearsing the flow and prototype, this happened to me a couple of times. It was happening, because I thought that by working on a project, and by knowing its ins and outs, or by the fact that I had been meticulously working on it for weeks or even months I was supposed to know everything about it. Right? After all, I had designed or directed it, but that was either very pretentious or naïve, in my case it was the latter.
The hard lesson learned: you have to rehearse your presentation. But I found that it’s even more crucial to plan and rehearse the user flow and/or the prototype, and, yes, you have to know all the ins and outs.
Action Plan
I’m not going to talk about how the presentation or the prototype are in terms of quality. We’ll pretend you have done a stellar job on the quality of your presentation, you have executed a good User Experience process and you have created a beautiful User Interface to present to the stakeholders. Here’s an overview of some of the key things to consider:
1. Ask a colleague that hasn’t been involved in the project, and show her/him the flow, starting with a brief introduction of the project or the product itself, and setup expectations on what is going to be shown and the context: the degree of completion of the user flow, the prototype, architecture, if there is a usability study etc.
Tell him/her to ask you as many as possible “where does this go?” or “what does this do?”
Set the facts straight and say that you are not reviewing the aesthetics of the project and or presentation unless she/he is a designer but even then, your goal is to see every possible flaw in your user flow or prototype and to realize what’s missing. If your user flow or prototype is incomplete, you at least have to know ‘the what’ and ‘how’ of each piece/page/interaction that is missing or incomplete.
Repeat this several times with different people. It is, also, useful to ask your significant other or a friend, sometimes the more removed from the project the person is, the better and more challenging it is, and it will probably give you a different context from someone who works at your company.
2. Start digging when you receive feedback: find out why you didn’t see some of the errors, or how come it’s missing parts in the flow and this will give you some context on why you ignored or didn’t think about a persona or how you missed something. Don’t beat yourself up, this is an introspective exercise to find answers. The main objective of realizing why you missed out or didn’t think about some things, is to make (or revise) a holistic overview of the project and have everything connected, not only a seamless user flow or prototype, but also a well thought out business case or model, strategy, functionalities, offline interactions, roadmap, etc.
3. With the feedback and introspective exercise, put the realizations and conclusions into play by starting to make changes. Then take the time to review these changes, keep on looking for all the controls and their functionalities or interactions: you are supposed to know what absolutely every single UI component does, and why. Review UI patterns and look for consistency, this sounds obvious, but you have to keep on reviewing these. At this point, you have also realized if the User Experience is working and why some of the decisions you took are the appropriate ones or not.
4. Show the user flow or prototype to someone you have already shown it to (from #1) and ask, “Did I solve some of the problems you experienced on the previous user flow?” and “Is it clearer now?”
5. Keep on reviewing and rehearsing, at this point you should be basically presenting to you alter-ego and asking what does this do.
6. This is the time to integrate the flow to the presentation and test the whole thing, yes, it is a lot of work and you might not have the time but you can always streamline the process.
7. Now is time to prepare your presentation which takes us below to the preparation.
Preparation
You have rehearsed and found the flaws, mistakes, doubts, errors and fixed them. You are now ready to begin preparing for the presentation to the stakeholders.
Run a final spell check and make sure that nothing is missing or sloppy.
Be sure you have the most updated file. It might sound obvious, but this should be number one on your presentation-day checklist.
Be redundant. Have a backup presentation on a USB key.
As a mac user, I have always been redundant about cables when preparing my presentation, even knowing your company’s presentation room setup, I found that there’s always adaptors MIA, broken or mistaken: basically have yours always handy when presenting on a projector or TV screen.
Presentation
Setup expectations on what is going to be shown, this is an intro to the presentation and it should be a good way for the stakeholders to know what they will be seeing and what to expect, this is to avoid surprises, assumptions, and speculations and it is also an index of content.
Have everything ready to play, I found that a lot of times you need to jump from a .pdf or .ppt to a browser with InVision or XD (or whatever you use) open and ready to go. Have notes or Text Edit open with the links of the prototype in case the browser crashes, but I guess this is only if you didn’t include links in the presentation.
Go slow. This probably the first time ever, that some people in the room have seen the project, they will need time to grab on to it.
And you know the rest…
Iterate
Keep on improving your user flow presentation skills by taking notes on people’s questions and remarks and pay attention to what works and what doesn’t. Do it after the presentation when you’re fresh and also remember people’s faces and reactions.
Keep on improving…
Do you have more tips? I’m all ears!
— Very special thanks to my editor, Merriah Lamb.
