How to be average at designing pitch decks.
This article explains exactly how to be average at designing pitch decks for research and in conducting user studies. This is a foolproof technique to attain mediocrity in your pitch decks and overall research process.
My day job is with a consumer insight/multimedia production company as a techperson, and our primary role is to connect top brands with the users or customers they are trying to reach. We know people and we have the tools to reach them, to mine insights from what they tell us.
I wasn’t always at the forefront of the research, usually in my room tinkering with font sizes and adjusting contrast in a bid to make us look good on the internet and to our clients.
Recently however, I participated in proper UX Research and designed presentations to defend it. I now realize it is so much more than Google Forms and pretty visualizations.
2 sure ways to be mediocre at pitch deck design
a.) Ditch design systems completely
The one thing you don’t need is a Design System.
A design system is a set of standards or rules your design should follow for consistency and scalability purposes.
Consistency
Not having a design system will help your design look deliciously inconsistent, helping you achieve that timeless look of mismatched slides pulled creatively from several stolen sources. A design system creates consistency and harmony within the product and makes it stand out instantly. If this is not your goal, do not use design systems at all.
Time
Aside from inconsistency being an important benefit, ditching a design system can help you work even longer hours on your artboard. You also get to spend more money on your internet subscription, since you’ll be building everything from scratch.
Communicating a brand
As a mediocre presentation designer, you want to really aim for confusing your readers about the brand you’re trying to communicate. Not using a design system to guide you will help you loads with that.
Recognition of a product (e.g. a pitch deck) as belonging to a certain brand is strongly influenced by brand-typical design attributes or a system.
b.) Stay tired and sleepy, especially while preparing deck
The grind culture or hustle culture is the ideology that glorifies hustle; it is achieved by always being active, available and reachable. It glorifies being stressed and sleepless.
You’re not really doing well if you don’t have Birkin bags under your eyes. In fact, you need your eyes to be a special kind of heavy so you can efficiently undermine and omit valuable answers/insights from your data bank for your final presentation.
User research comes with a lot of data you need to clean. It’s a repetitive, yet significant task to make your findings more accurate.
And so you must mistakenly discard some very insightful answers from the list because they all look the same and you’re too tired from building this pitch without a design system in the first place!
User Studies
A lot of thought goes into this — Before now, I’d conducted User studies with Google (Oppia) — my Outreachy task; I’d researched website UX from competitor brands, done flimsy user interviews/user tests and I have about 10 Google forms to my name, making me really believe I knew a thing or two about User studies.
I was wrong.
Research relating to user experience requires :
- Searching for the right personas
- Deciding which questions to ask them
- Designing how best to frame those questions so they easily understand
- Collecting all of their answers
- Mining their answers thoroughly for gold
The amount of thought and work that goes into each stage of this journey for answers is unbelievable. It’s no wonder why some sites look a certain way, or why some apps have a certain feel.
In a bid to launch as soon as possible, many tech products don’t go through the rigorous phase that is ‘UX Research’.
I’ve been in teams that never prioritized what the persona actually wants from a world of options, competing graphically on a daily basis, overwhelming us with ads everywhere we look (even in the fridge). It’s amazing how much insight we can get by actually listening to people.
Here are some things I did wrong during the research
- Jumping into conclusions about what the user said so I could sound more coherent — One time during the research, I sacrificed the facts for the sake of fluency.
Because I now find myself amidst smarter people, I tend to polish my words consciously and unconsciously. This gets in the way of communication and comprehension especially during surveys or user studies. Highkey wish we could talk more simply in the corporate world.
- Missing the tiny details — In my opinion, every interface designer must be involved in the research process to really understand how to communicate the findings extracted (both big picture stuff and little detail)
- Getting distracted while taking notes during interviews
- Subconscious confirmation bias — Discarding insights that challenged my assumptions rather than prioritizing them.
On Outsourcing UX Research
UX research, in my opinion should be one role on its own, and not a prerequisite for every UI/UX designer, though interface designers certainly need to be present, watching the research.
Designers and developers alike, tech teams, top brands and every visionary with a startup idea could easily outsource all of the research side of things to research agencies. They’d have the time to build while also getting the insights that’ll steer them in the right direction.
