Without a clear understanding of why you are making something or solving a problem, it's difficult to make informed design decisions.

This practical guide focuses on principles, tactics, and actionable methods for presenting your designs.Clear communication fosters a collaborative approach and ensures that everyone is aligned toward a common design goal. My eyes and ears are wide open, scouting for opportunities to improve the process or communicate better with my team. By articulating the design decisions emphasizing its purpose, we showcase our intent to resonate with clients and users alike. Being flexible and adaptive to change wasn’t something I considered a necessary skill, yet alone a skill itself.

This means that you may have an incredibly innovative and problem-solving design, but you may not get the support you want or need because you can’t speak about the design or the reasoning behind it in an effective way. Half the time, I’d show up would spend 30–60 minutes trying to figure out why I was there in the first place.To effectively articulate design decisions, it's important to be confident in your choices, but also open to feedback and willing to collaborate with others. The phenomenon that a non-expert can have an opinion about your design work is something that is almost entirely unique to design within today’s organizations. While you must prepare to defend your design decisions, it's equally important to acknowledge that there may be better solutions that can refine the design. Yet as Tom pointed out note-taking isn’t documentation, it’s just a collection of unorganised thoughts or ideas.

In meetings where designs will be presented, it is a good idea to anticipate reactions/objections and create and bring alternatives. Something else that I’ve come to learn from interviews and usability tests is to repeat the statements people are saying right back to them in the form of “What I hear you saying…” and rephrasing it in a way that moves the conversation forward. 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. As a result, designers gain better clarity about the client's requirements and objectives of the design project.When we bring alternatives to the table, it shows that we have considered several options and gives us the space to explain why the design we are pitching is the best.