November 2013

How Do You Prefer to Present Work?

As product designers, we often present our work to clients and product leads for feedback. But a bad presentation can kill good product design work. This month, we asked 103 designers how they exactly preferred to show their work to others. The results revealed that designers prefer very little overhead when giving presentations. Here’s what we found:

77%	In-person presentations
48%	Email with attachments
47%	Display work on screens (like TVs or computer monitors)
33%	Whiteboard presentations with printouts or sketches
31%	Screen-sharing software (like Skype)
25%	Presentation software (like Keynote)
25%	Display work on tablets
24%	Phone conversations
21%	Video conferencing (like GoToMeeting)
20%	Project management software (like Basecamp)

When it comes to presenting work, designers tend to prefer meeting in person — which isn’t too surprising. Face-to-face you’re able gauge the emotions in the room better and hem your presentation to match. You’re also able to take a client or team through the steps that lead to your design decisions. As one designer put it:

Nothing better than in-person presentation when it comes to defend your work.

For other designers, it’s also about controlling the feedback loop:

When presenting a design, I find showing it in context and presenting in person results in fewer rounds of micro-managed design feedback (e.g “change the margins”, “I prefer Times New Roman”, etc.) than if I merely plopped a JPG in an email.

So it’s no wonder that the top choices involve in-person meetings. But digging deeper, what’s really interesting is that these presentation methods require very little effort to put together. It’s far easier to meet in person, hop on the phone and share a screen than it is to slam work into a presentation tool. Why? Possibly because most tools are disappointing. We’re even working on our own tool that will make remote presentations easier.

Nevertheless, in-person meetings will remain in important part of the feedback loop. We’ll continue to probe deeper into how designers prefer to work and share our findings with you.