When first pursuing a career in UX or UI design, most people think of hard skills like design, problem solving, analytics, research, prototyping, or even UX writing.
While these are certainly foundational requirements to be successful as a working UX designer, it’s important not to underestimate the importance of also developing presentation and communication skills. Presentation skills are used to effectively bring ideas, concepts, and design information to life.
From slide decks to portfolio presentations, here are a few ways that presentation skills can support your career as a UX/UI designer.
Why Presentation Skills Are Important To UX / UI Roles
Design process might be at the core of your career work, but with every project and initiative, you also have to collaborate with and persuade those you work with. Here are a few scenarios where skillful presentation will help you out:
Portfolio Presentation
After pouring many hours of time and energy into creating a design portfolio that stands out, you should be able to rely on it to help you stand out from the competition during the job application process. Still, the collection of your designs and process is only a small portion of what interviewers look for. It’s important to also be able to articulate your own work clearly and confidently.
Sharing Design Iterations
How did you come up with a certain design or mockup based on the research and data you had to work with? Knowing how to present a holistic view of your work in a concise way can help your team arrive at a good solution much more quickly.
Presenting Final Designs
Confident, articulate presentation is a powerful tool when you’re presenting polished work for a final approval. Stilted communication can lead to tension, lack of trust, and a lack of appreciation for your work. But a strong, well-reasoned presentation can help persuade your audience to see your design solution in a new, more positive light.
10 Tips For Improving Your UX / UI presentation skills
From setting strategic goals and inviting audience participation, to preparation and planning for a positive mindset, there are several tactics that can help you to improve your presentation skills. Here are our favorite tips:
1. Determine a clear goal for the presentation
Take time to figure out what you want to achieve with your presentation. Are you showcasing your portfolio to a potential employer? Are you trying to persuade a senior manager or a prospective client to try a new design idea? Are you updating stakeholders on your latest research findings?
Take your primary goal and work backwards to plot out the presentation structure and the most salient points you want to convey.
2. Keep it short and have one clear theme
It’s difficult to absorb and retain large amounts of information at a time, so try to keep your presentation short and focused on one key theme. Look for opportunities throughout your presentation to make the content more concise, like using bullet points to summarize long text paragraphs, or creating visual graphs to give a holistic view of stats and research. Not only will this make it easier for your audience to retain the information, but they’ll also feel more engaged with the content.
3. Weave humor into your presentation
Humor can be a great tool to help your audience relax and build rapport during your presentation.
Everyone’s sense of humor is a little different, so dark humor or direct jokes are unlikely to break the ice. Instead, try weaving in light-hearted examples to expand on various aspects in your presentation. If you feel comfortable, you could also include a funny anecdotal story about yourself to illustrate a point. Again, this should be audience appropriate, so you may want to try any humor out on a trusted colleague or friend before delivering it to a large group.
4. Invite audience participation
For all but the very briefest of presentations, you might want to spend time finding creative ways to involve your audience. Use direct questions to ask for opinions, and educated guesses to encourage your audience to really think about what you’re saying. If nothing else, asking for a show of hands (“how many of you have wondered if there’s an easier way to use X app?”) can help your listeners to feel as if their opinion is valuable to you, which in turn makes them more active listeners.