Reflective design

Recently another designer asked me about how they can give more thoughtful and coherent responses to questions that they’re asked while presenting their work. That made me remember how often I used to wonder about the same thing while listening to people I admired field questions as conference panelists, or speak very lucidly in podcast interviews.

I was intimated when I thought about how smart those people had to be, to always respond so well. The gap between us felt huge, because I knew that in similar situations I didn’t sound nearly so cogent. My experience of being put on the spot was always feeling like I knew the answer on some level, but rarely being able to find the words to do it justice.

As I gained experience, I got better at talking about my design work without necessarily being aware of how that had happened. When I thought about it a little bit, I realized something important: Although they are very smart, most of the people I admired for their ability to always have a good response ready were not singular geniuses—they were just better prepared than I was.

How relieving, to discover that responding well has more to do with preparation than raw brain power. That makes it within anyone’s grasp. But it’s also intimidating to think about how much extra work it must take to sound like you know what you’re talking about.

The good news is that you don’t always have to carve out dedicated prep time before a meeting to ensure that you sound articulate. It’s far more effective to prepare to talk about your design work as you’re doing it. The reasoning is simple—it’s easier to assess design decisions as you’re making them than it is to try and piece your reasoning together after you’ve done the work.

Preparing as you go

In my own design process, “preparing as I go” involves maintaining two complementary practices as I work.

First, I take time to explain my reasoning to myself as I weigh decisions. Most of the time this takes the shape of a running internal commentary on my decision-making process, and I’ve also found it helpful to write parts of that commentary down. Most designers have reasons supporting their decisions, even the ones that feel totally instinctive, but not everyone takes the time to think about what those reasons are, note them down, and reflect on them later.

The second thing I do is keep an eye on the decisions I’ve made, and the information I’m discovering, and try to identify larger themes that summarize and connect them all. Relating individual decisions to themes and values is what makes it possible to go from only being able to answer a few canned questions to potentially thousands of questions. When you get a tough question, it’s easier to first link it up to one of the big themes than it is to come up with one perfect answer. Once you connect to a theme, you can start your response at a higher level of abstraction, and then ladder it down to more concrete examples to show how your specific design decisions support user and business needs.

Again, following these two practices is a way to prepare to talk about your design work before anyone has even asked you to do so. It’s hard to squeeze fluency out of a couple of hours of dedicated prep, after you’ve completed the work. But if you can reflect on your design decisions as you’re making them, and think about the larger themes that tie them together, you’ll create hooks that make those ideas easier to re-access in the future. When someone asks about a specific design decision you’ve made, you won’t have to scramble to reconstruct an explanation from scratch. All you have to do is hook into some of the themes and ideas that you already pored over as you were designing.

The real skill of someone who has an articulate answer to every question is not improvisation; it’s the ability to select the relevant ideas from a pool of well-considered ideas, and link them together on the spot to convince someone or make a point.