Be prepared to defend your design decisions, but also be open to feedback and willing to make changes if necessary.

Talking to people about your designs might seem like a basic skill, but it can be difficult to do efficiently and well.A prerequisite for a good brainstorming session is that the team be clear about the challenges they need to solve and the objectives they must achieve. Tom packed a lot into an hour, somehow balanced speaking with questions and exercises, and we all took away some great exercise templates. This helps clients understand the reasoning behind your choices and how it aligns with their business goals. As an engineer I value technical constraints and want to know the technicality required to make this project successful, so I should focus on how to address these. Using sketches, wireframes, and mockups helps you illustrate your decisions in an easy-to-understand way.

When lead designers communicate this effectively, they steer the design team in the right direction.Based on my book Articulating Design Decisions, these online classes focus on principles, tactics, and actionable methods for helping you present design to other people. When articulating design decisions, we always present the logic behind each decision from the user's perspective. Something that really stuck with me is the idea that as a designer you present and talk about your work in different ways with different people.