Build Design Systems With Penpot Components
Penpot's new component system for building scalable design systems, emphasizing designer-developer collaboration.

uxdesign.cc – User Experience Design — Medium | Fabricio Teixeira
In 13 years working in UX, I have joined a considerable number of meetings where UX Designers present their work to the rest of the team. More than I can remember, to be brutally honest. Consumer journeys, sitemaps, wireframes, benchmark audits, personas, user research reports — the list of deliverables designers are creating is huge.
Presenting work sounds simple in theory.
After all, you have done all the work: you have spent countless hours exploring all possible design solutions, you have captured all your ideas on paper and have discussed them exhaustively with other designers, strategists and developers to vet feasibility and business sense.
Now all you have to do is get in front of everyone and share your thinking.
No big deal, right?
“A good UX deliverable clearly communicates its purpose and what it’s trying to achieve. It anticipates any questions and scenarios which may be posed.” — Nick Haley, Head of UX at Guardian Media
But what seems like a simple step in the process can be decisive for your ideas to be accepted, built and implemented. You can come up with the most brilliant design solution in the world; if it is not clearly communicated to your team and/or clients, a lot of the effort and value you added to the project can disappear in thin air.
If your team does not understand your solution, you have a problem.
If they understand, but do not agree with it, you still have a problem.
If they agree with the solution, but are not delighted/excited about it, you can still have a problem later on.
A developer won’t be happy to build a solution they disagree with. Actually, there’s a chance they will make even the smallest problems seem like a big roadblock to keep pushing that solution forward.
You are dealing with humans, not machines.
Recently I have started looking closer to that specific moment of the design process — sharing your work — and often times I find myself paying more attention to how the designer is presenting it than what they are saying.
So, like everything in my life, I’ve decided to take notes, organize my thoughts and break down the topic into more digestible pieces.
Let’s get started.
It’s not uncommon that creative environments (like design studios or design teams within larger companies) create the expectation that everyone in the team will be inherently an extrovert. The design world celebrates extroversion way more than introversion, feeding the stereotype that designers have to be talkative, expansive, fun and incredibly good communicators all the time.
Such qualities do have an impact on the work itself, that’s for sure.
Extroverts tend to have a more collaborative mindset, shop their work around more often, and sometimes are thrown under the bus to present work without having time to prepare. Most of them don’t even need to prepare.
But the reality is: most of the UX designers I know live right on the other side of that spectrum.
I remember reading an article from Smashing Magazine a few years ago that talked about how important it is to value and leverage introverts’ abilities within a design team. It is a pretty thorough article that gives some good advice for introverts on how to max their strengths (instead of trying to force themselves to becoming extroverts):
But I have also noticed that there is a direct relationship between where a designer sits in the introvert-extrovert spectrum, and how much they rely on whatever they are showing on the screen when presenting work.
There is a direct relationship between where a designer sits in the introvert-extrovert spectrum, and how much they rely on whatever they are showing on the screen when presenting work.
The level of detail of a design deliverable is inversely proportional to the presenter’s storytelling skills.
UX deliverables tend to be content-heavy by nature. Sitemaps, flows, user journeys — all the systematic thinking the UX designer puts into the work, if not properly explained, can end up generating documents that are just too dense to be digested in the 20 or 30 minutes people are able to maintain their focus out of a one-hour meeting.
Introverts end up compensating their discomfort with verbal communication through more polished, more detailed and more thorough design deliverables — covering all imaginable use cases and variations. Super detailed user journeys, impeccable wireframes, and sitemaps that would make Garrett very proud.
Designers with stronger verbal communication skills are able to capture people’s attention and focus it on the story being told in the meeting. When designers are aware of such superpowers, they know they can produce simpler deliverables and rely more on their voice-over for the details. Slides tend to be sharper, more focused, and work more as a reminder for the designer of chapters of the story they are trying to tell.
In an ideal world, designers are not only great presenters and storytellers, but they can also create clear, simple and organized documents that go deep into the details when needed. If you know anyone like this, let me know — because I would love to hire that person.
A more realistic scenario is to try to balance your team to have professionals that sit in different places of the introvert-extrovert spectrum. I have seen a lot of design pairs that seem to complement each other just perfectly: one is more of a systematic thinker that can easily deal with all the complexity of building a digital product, while the other knows how to package up the story to make it compelling and relatable when selling the idea internally or with clients.
But it’s not easy to have these two people always allocated to the same project, or always have them in the room at the same time.
Another solution is to create mechanisms that allow a designer to flex more often between the two ends of the spectrum. Make sure you are not forcing the designer to act against their own nature and personality — which can make people really uncomfortable.
A few pieces of advice:
Hope this helps.
The relationship between design deliverables and presentation skills was originally published in uxdesign.cc on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
AI-driven updates, curated by humans and hand-edited for the Prototypr community