How can you present your design thinking process and outcomes effectively?

1 Know your purpose and audience

Before you start preparing your presentation, you need to define your purpose and audience. What are you trying to achieve with your presentation? What are the key messages you want to convey? Who are you presenting to and what are their expectations, needs, and interests? Knowing your purpose and audience will help you tailor your content, tone, and style to suit them. For example, if you are presenting to a potential client, you might want to focus on how your design thinking process helped you understand their problem and deliver a valuable solution. If you are presenting to a peer group, you might want to highlight the challenges and learnings you encountered along the way.

2 Use a clear structure and narrative

A good presentation should have a clear structure and narrative that guides your audience through your design thinking journey. A common framework is to use the five stages of design thinking: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. For each stage, you can explain what you did, why you did it, what you learned, and how you moved forward. You can also use storytelling techniques to make your presentation more engaging and memorable. For example, you can start with a hook that captures your audience's attention, use anecdotes and examples to illustrate your points, and end with a strong call to action or takeaway.

3 Show your evidence and impact

One of the benefits of design thinking is that it produces tangible and measurable outcomes that can demonstrate your value and impact. Therefore, you should show your evidence and impact throughout your presentation. Evidence can include user research data, insights, personas, journey maps, sketches, prototypes, feedback, and test results. Impact can include user satisfaction, business goals, social benefits, or other metrics that show how your solution improved the situation. You can use visuals, such as photos, videos, charts, or graphs, to make your evidence and impact more appealing and convincing.

4 Be concise and selective

When presenting your design thinking process, it is important to be concise and selective in order to avoid overwhelming or boring your audience. Focus on the most relevant and important aspects of your process and outcomes. To ensure you are presenting the right content, consider the following questions: what does your audience need or want to know? What are the main points or takeaways you want them to remember? What are the most compelling or surprising findings or results you want them to see? What are the most critical or controversial issues or questions you want them to discuss?

5 Practice and get feedback

Finally, you should practice and get feedback on your presentation before you deliver it. Practicing will help you improve your delivery, timing, and confidence. Getting feedback will help you identify and address any gaps, errors, or weaknesses in your content, structure, or style. You can practice and get feedback from yourself, by recording and reviewing your presentation, or from others, by asking for their opinions and suggestions. You should also test your presentation on the same device and platform that you will use for the actual presentation, to avoid any technical issues or glitches.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?