Design for your users, and your team.
Why it matters: A great design solution can’t come to life if decision-makers and engineers don’t understand its value — much less how it works. As a UX Designer, your job doesn’t just stop at users; it’s about understanding your team to make sure design intent doesn’t get lost in translation. In this way, success comes from knowing how to frame up, and talk about your design so that it actually lands with your team.
Key takeaways:
- The medium is the message. Find what clicks with your audience, whether it’s prototypes, slide decks, or one-pagers.
- Know your collaborators, and know them deeply. Trace the reason why someone should want to attend a meeting, how they want to contribute, and design for them.
- Don’t just present your work; get curious about where your ideas land and where they fall flat, so you can deliver the right information to the right people at the right time.
Why aren’t good designs always successful?
When I graduated from SCAD in 2024, I thought I had a pretty good sense of what UX design looked like in a professional setting. But we don’t know what we don’t know — and it turns out communicating about UX design is not one-size-fits-all.
I’ve come to see that success isn’t just about the quality of the design — it’s about how well I can frame it.
Great design always stems from a deep understanding of the user, and that same principle applies to communicating your ideas internally. What works in one setting for one audience can fall flat in another, so learning how to listen to and observe the team around me has helped me know if I’m actually solving their problem.
Match the medium to your audience
Over the course of working with a client, I was building out hefty research insight boards in FigJam. We would share these with our stakeholders, but they never referenced them. They weren’t ignoring us, they just didn’t use FigJam. Most of their conversations happened over a PowerPoint deck. Once we turned our research into a clean slide deck, it started getting passed around, cited, and reused in executive presentations. Same insights, different format, attuned to the audience’s context.
That moment shifted my thinking — if changing the medium made such a difference, where else could I adapt my work to make it truly resonate?
Appeal to the right audience at the right time
In that same project, after a series of research presentations that felt like they weren’t landing, we realized that people across the organization were being invited to our presentations. In this case, inviting too many people hindered our progress. Not everyone had the same stake in the work that our immediate stakeholders did.
So we focused on a new strategy for planning work: drafting monthly briefs and identifying the most vital stakeholders to invite each time.
Finding this balance between inviting individual members, silo-ing teams, and inviting everyone regardless of team helped us to work with efficiency and deliver the right work, to the right people, at the right time.
Experiencing something resonates more than reading it
Working alongside a client, we were asked to design user flow documentation and hand it off to a larger team, but we noticed it hardly made an impact. Then we tried something new. We built a clickable prototype for people to feel the experience themselves. The prototypes started spreading. It spilled over from just the product team and sparked new conversations with sales, technical teams, and higher leadership. The prototype didn’t just show our work — it invited conversation and questions about what the product could be, in a new and tactical way.
The job of a UX Designer
Selling our designs is an integral part of our job as designers. When we design something, we also have to be ready to transpose, translate, and frame it in different ways to effectively communicate it to our audience — and that doesn’t always mean a user.
In addition to sketches, people’s perspectives and conversations fill up my notebooks; paying close attention to how the PMs talk about a scenario, how a developer thinks through the tech, and how another designer may approach the problem. This has been especially helpful when I jump into a project.
The next time you find yourself in a position defending a design decision, handing off a design file, presenting a feature flow, or participating in collaboration workshops, take real note of how your team thinks:
- Does your PM think more technically, or do they often point to larger company goals?
- Does your developer advocate for usability, or are they more focused on the data?
- Do your design partners speak with stories, or do they lean more on observations?
Ultimately, ask questions to understand how your team approaches their work and goals.
Changing the language around design has helped me spend less time debating whether a design is “good” and seek out what makes a design successful. Successful design is built on the trust your partners have in you, and shaped by the conversations you have with them. If you don’t spend the time communicating, your design will not work out!
Summing it up
Every team is different. When you take time to understand the people around your work, your ideas go further and you create the space for great designs to actually come to life.
Even in the simple tasks, this understanding elevates your impact. At Visual Logic, we often come into projects with teams who have been working together for years. In this environment, sometimes even designing a button seems simple. However, the surefire way to push a design to the finish line, making impact where it matters the most, is by raising these questions. That’s why the clients we work with keep coming back — once a collaborator, always a collaborator
Design is a fluid process and is shaped by the people involved in it. An open mind is critical to delivering something truly impactful.
