How to focus on 'The Why'
Reading time: 3.5 minutes.
Today I’m going to show how you can focus on why when presenting design to stakeholders.
There's a lot of talk about the importance of focusing on why.
But it’s mysterious.
Why does it matter?
And how do you do it anyway?
First thing’s first: Why does it matter?
Focusing on why is rocket fuel for your career
No way I can say it better than Simon Sinek. But I can speak to the benefits you can expect.
Focus on why when you present design work and watch these things start to happen:
- Speed. Faster buy-in and less rework.
- Credibility boost. You’ll be more trusted and respected—a strategic partner instead of someone who can “make the mocks”.
- Better alignment. Teams with a shared understanding of vision and goals move faster, collaborate more, and make better decisions.
- Smaller gap between the design and what actually gets built.
- Better product quality and performance.
These roll up to my favorite benefits for you: Getting hired, getting promoted, making more money, and having more freedom in your life. ā¯¤ļø¸
Unfortunately a lot of designers never learn how to do this because:
- It’s rarely taught in schools and bootcamps
- Online resources are hard to find, not very specific, or too expensive
- It’s hard to learn on the job without the right leads/mentors/coaches
Let’s see if we can chip away at that.
Step 1: Make sure you understand the why
If you don’t understand the why behind a project or feature you’re working on, how can you communicate it to others?
When you present design work your job is to show stakeholders why the design is good.
This involves tying your design to business goals, customer pains, and technical constraints.
If you don’t understand those things you’re set up for failure no matter how killer the UI is.
Lots of tools are at your disposal to understand the why. Here are a few:
- User or stakeholder interviews
- Contextual inquiry
- SMART goals
- Design briefs
- Working backwards docs (PR/FAQ)
- Success metrics and KPIs
Step 2: Set the stage
So many designers make the mistake of giving too much or the wrong kind of context.
It’s absolutely true that the audience needs some context to understand the design they’re about to see.
And you need to lay the groundwork for why the design you’re about to show is good.
But that doesn’t mean you should tell the full story of the project vision or your process when you present design.
Wes Kao captures it well:
Here’s my formula for determining what context (sometimes called backstory, framing, or exposition in storytelling terms):
- Start with the project context: What, why, who, where, when, how.
- Remove anything that your audience already knows.
- Remove anything that’s not directly relevant to the design you’re presenting.
- Add the bare minimum necessary for your design recommendations to be understood and persuasive.
Here’s what I did for a recent client project where I was pitching a redesign of the upload process for a video management and distribution platform. The audience was a PM that I worked with nearly every day.
We’d been in the weeds for a while so it was time for a quick recap of the project context. And I mean quick. I spent less than a minute revisiting our goals and customer problems.
My main goals here were to establish that I did my homework and get my audience thinking about the big picture:
Next I showed the additional context I wanted the audience to have:
- What the current upload process looked like.
- Why it looked that way (to save dev time).
- What our customers will expect (a competitive analysis).
Step 3: Show your design and tie it back to goals & problems
Almost there! We’re about to show our audience why the redesign is good and get them on board with our design proposal.
We do that by tying our design back to business goals and customer pains/problems.
I presented a number of different slides but there are two I want to focus on.
First, a simple slide that maps HMW statements to features and design elements I was about to show:
Next, I showed a series of screens deconstructing the current implementation. I pointed out how it makes things difficult for customers.
It all led up to this slide. It shows the new design with annotations that talk about why it’s better.
The result? The PM agreed we should make the changes and wanted to get them into the next release.
That’s it! I hope this gives you ideas for how you can present your design work more effectively.
Helpful Links
Dan Winer tells us about the 5W1H Framework and provides a template that helps teams understand the what, why, who, when, where, and how.
Gamma.app is the best AI design tool I’ve seen so far for creating presentations.
Portfolio spotlight: Abdus Salam sets a high bar for online case studies by hooking the reader and focusing on why: why the project mattered and why certain steps were taken. Excellent visual design as well.
Sera Tajima gives her take on what’s missing from case studies and how you can use the why to make yours better.
