Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Jacob V. Credit: Jacob Voyles

For the past few months I have been working at an agency and have learned a-lot on the lines of presenting designs to non-designers. One thing I have notice, is being an passionate designer we often loose sight that other people aren’t designers or have a basic understanding of design, so I’m going to go over some best practices on presenting designs to non-designers.

Presenting designs incorrectly can create a living hell for you, the client can have a complete misinterpretation about the designs and give you incorrect feedback. Proper presenting skills help clients see us designers point of view and allow us to communicate with the client 110% more efficient. Here are some ideas for the next time you need to present your designs.

1. Mock-Ups

Credit: Denis Abdullin

Present your designs the best you can, if you are designing an website, make sure you put your designs into an computer mock-up. This lets the client see a real world example of how their website will look. You will be surprised on how much this has effect on a project, it’s day and night.

2. Stay Focus and be Strong

If you are new to working at an agency or freelancing you can find it troubling with talking to clients and being afraid of taking leadership when presenting designs to clients because you don’t want to come off to aggressive.

The best practice when presenting your designs to an client, is to have specific focal points on each page. Do not go over everything, find specific points on each page and only focus on them only. If you go over every little thing on the design the client will loose focus on what’s important and begin to give inaccurate feedback or become fixated on non-important parts of the design.

Also, don’t be afraid to take leadership of the presentation. Remember that you are the designer who is presenting the designs, they are not. Try your best to go over your thinking behind your design and try to get the client to understand your thinking the best you can.

3. Control the flow of the presentation

When I first started out working in an agency, the meetings would usually consist of the client taking control of the presentation and everything would spiral out of control. Which is frightening and overall horrible. Here are some ways to take control of the flow of the presentation.

A good rule of thumb to do in every presentation is to always ask the client to hold feedback until the end of your presentation, after you walked the client through the designs.
Make sure to take your time to present your designs, don’t get into a big rush, but always remember too that your client probably has other things to do, so don’t waste to much time going over parts of the design that have no impact on the final version or are just flat-out useless to feedback.

4. Guide Feedback

Before you present your designs to your client, make sure you notified them what kind of feedback you are looking for on the design. Always clarify what the client should be looking for, if it’s the visual ascetics or the structure. You don’t want to be bombarded with feedback on how the “Lorem Ipsum” isn’t the content they want on their site.

Takeaway

Presenting designs can be difficult at the beginning it’s something you won’t be perfect at over night, it takes time and experince. Just be confident and you’ll be alright.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to check out my other articles or some of my designs.

Presenting your Designs to Non-Designers was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Presenting your Designs to Non-Designers

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