What 15 years in design taught me about presenting with purpose

Early in my career (circa 2009), I sat quietly at the back of a client meeting while a senior designer presented a beautifully executed concept of a portal redesign. I was observing intensely and eager to learn. The work itself was strong: clean UI, smart UX decisions, attention to detail. But as the walkthrough progressed, I noticed something: the energy in the room dropped.

The client wasn’t reacting to the layout. They were squinting at it. Asking questions about colours, about font sizes, about whether the filters should go on the left instead of the right. The presentation had become a slow, methodical tour of screens, with no real narrative, no emotional pull, and no clear sense of what any of it actually meant to the people using it.

I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but I remember thinking: this feels like explaining the ingredients instead of describing the taste!

That meeting has never left me. In the years since, I’ve returned to that moment regularly. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learnt after 15 years of designing and leading product teams, it’s this: Great work doesn’t speak for itself. You have to give it a voice.

Design isn’t just a craft, it’s a conversation

You can’t present design the same way you create it. The mindset that gets us to good work, iterative, logical, methodical, is rarely the mindset that gets clients, execs or teams aligned around it.

People don’t respond to features. They respond to change. To clarity. To something that makes them feel more certain about a decision they’ve been circling for weeks.

That’s why storytelling isn’t a nice-to-have in design presentations. It’s a skill. One I’ve had to learn, practice, and refine (especially in complex projects!), where the product had to balance risk, live data, regulation, and usability. With so many moving parts, the only way to get people to see the why behind the design was to wrap the work in a narrative that anchored it to something real.

How I now structure my presentations

Over time, I developed a framework for walking people through design in a way that’s not just informative, it’s persuasive. It’s not about screens. It’s about the story.

This is the general pattern I follow:

1. The world before

Never start with the solution. Start with the problem as the user experiences it. Ground it in their language, not ours.

When we were redesigning the dashboard for the fleet product, I didn’t open with visual hierarchy or performance metrics. I started with a day in the life of a fleet manager: juggling vehicle locations, driver behaviours, and zone monitoring, often from a mobile device, and often under pressure. Their frustration wasn’t that the UI was clunky. Their frustration was that they couldn’t act quickly or with confidence.

That’s where a good story begins, with something recognisable. Not in Figma, but in real life!

2. The turning point

Once that shared reality is clear, then, and only then, do I introduce the design. Not as a set of screens, but as an intervention. A decision. A change.

In the fleet tool, we designed real-time alerts that surfaced anomalies in driver behaviour before they became a risk. But instead of saying, “Here’s a new notification system,” I framed it as: “This is the moment the fleet manager stops reacting and starts anticipating.”

Think of it this way. You’re not selling a feature. You’re introducing the moment something shifts, in behaviour, in clarity, in control.

3. The journey

Then I walk through the work, but always through the lens of what matters to the user. Not “this button does X,” but “this interaction supports x behaviour”. I’ve found that clients care less about what things are called and more about what they make possible.

For example, we simplified the driver scoring interface to show only meaningful outliers, rather than a dense data dump. That wasn't a UI choice, it was a clarity choice. Because when you’re managing 40+ vehicles, you’re not reading charts. You’re scanning for risk.

This is where so many presentations go off-track: explaining the interface without explaining the intention behind it. The structure of the screens matters far less than the structure of the thinking.

4. The new world

Finally, I circle back to the user. What’s different now? How has their day changed? What used to feel chaotic now feels calm? What was once a blind spot is now a moment of insight?

This isn’t about dramatics, it’s about emotional resolution. When I close a walkthrough, I want the client to understand what it feels like to use the product now. The design might look beautiful. But more importantly, it feels useful. Predictable and considered.

And that’s the transformation you want them to remember!!

Why this matters at a leadership level

My role isn’t just to lead great work. It’s to create clarity around that work, so it can live, scale, and be championed beyond the design team.

Storytelling helps me:

• Win trust in cross-functional environments

• Get buy-in from legal, compliance, and engineering… not just product!

• Reframe feedback from subjective to strategic

• Align everyone around the actual user problem, not their own preferences

It’s the difference between a stakeholder saying, “Can we try this in blue?” and “How do we make this even easier for our users to act on quickly?”

That shift doesn’t happen by showing a screen. It happens by showing a story.

4 key points to presenting your design work

Use this as a mental checklist when preparing any walkthrough, especially when the stakes are high.

1. Start with the real world, not the wireframe
If you opened your presentation and didn’t show a single screen for the first two minutes, ask yourself if the room would still care?

2. Frame the design as a change, not a layout
Focus on what’s different now. Not just visually, but functionally and emotionally.

3. Explain intention, not just interaction
Can every screen you show be tied to a user behaviour, need, or moment?

4. Bring the user back into the conversation at the end
If the only thing your audience remembers is how this design improves someone’s day, you’ve done your job.

Everyone lives their lives through stories, not stats, features or interface patterns. It’s how we connect, remember, and make meaning. The stories we tell ourselves and each other are what shape our beliefs and behaviour. They’re the glue of how we understand the world.

So when we present our work as a narrative, when we show change, progress, and emotion, we’re not dumbing things down. We’re meeting people where they already are.

That’s not just good communication. It’s good design.