Shadowing Practice: How to organize and present your design explorations for feedback - Learn English Speaking with Video

If you're like me, chances are you have a section

or page in your Figma file for you to go rogue and explore different ideas and concepts.

For me, usually I have either like a sandbox or a playground page just dedicated for me, my personal space to explore different ideas.

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Ideation and exploration is an important part of the design process and usually comes in the first part of the double diamond.

And if you're not sure what I mean when I'm talking about the double diamond, go and check out this video I made here all about the double diamond process.

Now imagine you're a product manager or an engineer

and you're coming in to the Figma file to review different explorations and ideas that you're proposing asynchronously.

I can imagine for them it's probably pretty overwhelming to come into someone's Figma file

and might be difficult for them to figure out what the latest is, the different explorations you're trying to share, and what your rationale and thoughts are behind those different explorations.

Or let's consider a design review, where the purpose of the review is for you to present different explorations, get some feedback from your reviewers.

Walking reviewers through your design explorations, whether it's asynchronously or in a design review, does require some skill.

And I do think that there are ways

that you can set yourself up for success here to make sure

that you're getting the most effective kind of feedback that you need to move forward.

So to do this, you'll need to provide context, show your concepts, have rationale for those different concepts,

and lastly, have a recommendation or a preferred solution that you would like to move forward with.

Context can either be provided in advance of the review through like a pre -read that you share out asynchronously, or you could provide it in the review itself.

And this is what I usually do where I have a

couple of slides at the beginning of my presentation to kind of set the context

and let folks know where we're at in the project.

So I usually share where we're in the design process, any key dates or milestones coming up, the problem statement and what we're trying to solve

and maybe something around sort of the product requirements or like exactly what this review is focused on.

Then I dive into presenting the different concepts and ideas that I have.

I might talk about the pros and cons for each of those concepts

and make sure I'm really touching on the rationale behind my decisions.

on how to do that confidently, clearly and concisely.

Rationale is important because it's going to help you get more buy -in

and convince your stakeholders of the direction you want to move forward with.

It's no help showing concepts without giving any rationale behind the decisions you're making and why you believe in this concept.

So it's worth putting the extra effort into documenting that

and presenting it so your reviewers know the thought that's been put in behind your decisions.

So rather than talking about how to do this, I actually want to jump on over into Figma

and walk you through some real examples from my past projects of kind of how I've laid out different explorations,

how I've communicated and articulated rationale in reviews and in sort of one -on -one jams with my PM.

It's not perfect and I didn't sort of touch up or tidy anything in advance of doing this video.

I want to show you the raw real kind of behind -the -scenes work of some of my projects.

And I feel like my process for this has evolved over time

and kind of adapts and changes based on who I'm trying to get feedback from, project is in so I would probably put a lot more effort into having really concise

and clear articulated documented rationale

if I was presenting to a senior stakeholder versus just trying to jam on a few ideas with my PM.

You'll see in what I'm about to show you that the fidelity differs quite a lot also.

I have some really low fidelity wireframe -y type stuff to some more high fidelity flows

so I don't think there is a particular rule as to what the fidelity should be regardless of

those different explorations and ideas that you have.

Hopefully you can get some inspiration from this.

Let's go.

Okay, so here we are in Figma.

And as promised, this is messy and not necessarily beautiful high fidelity designs.

But this was a project I was working on back at Uber Eats, where we were bringing stories into Uber Eats.

And so here you can see I had three different ideas laid out, very low fidelity here, like we're just focusing on the entry point.

And then I kind of explained each one and some of the questions I had.

So in this exploration, for example, view the updates

and like I had sort of a pro here like works well as a permanent entry point

but I also had maybe not necessarily cons

but like questions you know like things we need to think about

if we were to take this approach

so here's just a look at sort of

that button exploration this was exploring like having the entry point be within the profile picture of the merchant

and you can see here I added preferred solution so really pointing out what my recommendation is and then

that would tell you like there is a new update.

So that's how I laid those out.

And then another part of this project was also kind of diving into what the updates would look like.

And I kind of had two different explorations.

One was like a newsfeed style and the other one was like a full screen story style.

Again, you can see which one I'm recommending.

But another interesting thing that I did here was kind of breaking this out into MVP and like future or like vision.

was going to creep beyond the scope that we had for this project, I kind of like laid out, okay, well, ideally we could get to this in the future,

but today for MVP, you know, it would be something a little bit more basic.

And I found that this was really helpful because I found that if I only show the like MVP version, sometimes I can get asked a lot of questions around like, well, why not this?

Or what about that?

And it's like, okay, yeah, those are all great ideas.

I would love to do helpful to show the future vision to let people know I've thought about that.

These are things that I have been considering and I think would be great in a future version.

So I don't know, that was like something I learned as I went, as I was presenting and sharing my ideas a lot of the time that it was just helpful to show like, okay, here's realistically what we can do now.

And here's what we can do in the future.

And last note on that, I also find showing the future one can be helpful in terms of like, if you know, that's where you want to go, let's choose an MVP version

there in the future so for example if we were aligned

that say our future vision would be this like full screen

story style let's not do this as an mvp even though it may be easier for now

because that's only going to create like design and tech debt

and it's going to take us longer to get to

that future vision so yeah that's why i broke it out

that way the next one is for the same project

but in this case i broke it down by user stories so i can't remember where

user stories kind of written out in this case i've just taken one example

which is this user story here and then i broke out the explorations for

that particular user story

so here we can see an exploration for entry point here

we can see an exploration for having the message be more

embedded on the screen i know i'm not providing full context

of the project just kind of try to focus on like

how i'm presenting the information here's like another exploration where i did more of a teaser

approach supporting this user story and again having that clear recommendation.

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Okay next one, next one.

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Moving on to another project.

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So this project, I was kind of exploring both the placement and the visual design of something.

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And you can see here that I didn't include like any sort of written down context or rationale.

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This was because I was jamming on this directly with my product manager.

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So we would have like one -on -one weekly jams.

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And like this was enough for us to have discussion, right?

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Like we just wanted to have conversations around what would work.

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And for that purpose, he's the PM on the project.

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I didn't feel like I needed to provide like all that background context and really break out the pros and cons.

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But what I like about this approach is

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that like first I was just exploring the placement of the like let's call it a widget.

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I was basically adding a widget to the screen which is this like gray box of audience size.

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And so I have these different explorations here on like where

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that could go on the screen like what the different placement could be.

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And so again like really low fidelity this is like just to have a conversation with my PM right

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start those conversations like what might it feel like

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if it's down here or like over up here

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and then the next sort of section was around like what the visual of

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that widget would be and so I had like inspiration on the left

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and then like the uber style of it on the right using sort of our design system

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and things like that and

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so again like I don't have a lot of written down rationale here

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but this was like great just to have those conversations and discussions

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and then the last one was kind of like placing those widgets actually onto the screen in the placement

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that we were kind towards which you can see is this placement with it here on the right hand side.

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I think you can kind of adapt how you present and show these explorations based on your audience.

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So in my case, this was just a jam with my PM.

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I didn't have to go and create that like perfectly organized, all of the context rationale written down kind of version of this work.

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This was enough for us to have the conversation for us to make a decision together.

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And then I would have done

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that for like the next step of sort of getting stakeholder alignment or like a design review.

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This one is a early concept exploration.

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So again, quite low infidelity.

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If I zoom in here for a second, you'll see that this is kind of like super wireframey.

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And I basically had four different concepts on how to sort of like approach the problem we were

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For each really I would kind of like label that concept

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so give it a name which I think is really helpful

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when you're in a discussion and you want to refer to a particular concept.

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So in this one, this case it's called intent capture.

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That was the name of the concept.

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And then I sort of had like the user stories

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and kind of like the persona

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or like who we're kind of designing for just to kind

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of like back up a little bit this sort of concept and this exploration.

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For this one in particular I had like three different ideas within that concept.

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And so I kind of labeled them like this down the side.

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For the others, I kind of just had one.

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Actually for this one, like I never actually ended up designing it.

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I think sort of similar to what I was talking about with the other one.

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Sometimes you can keep things like really high level and you don't need to design out, you know, full perfect flows and wireframes.

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In this case, like we had this sort of shared language internally, everyone knew what I meant when I was talking about wallet first.

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And so I didn't need to go and provide all of that extra like visual to support it.

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This was enough, again, just to have that conversation

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which out of these four concepts is sort of the direction we want to go in.

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And so just keeping the fidelity to that level just to support that conversation, rather than like over designing it.

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And you can see here in this case, I've also added some annotations underneath some of these screens.

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We have these created at WellSimple as components.

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I highly recommend creating some of those and having them really available to use in your design system.

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It's going to make your workflow for this so much faster.

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And so, yeah, this is like another look at how I've presented some different ideas.

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For this last one, it's a little bit different.

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It's less about sort of showing different explorations, but more around how I kind of show flows rather than like,

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you know, one off screens with different ideas.

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So in this case, I had some flows for this project and I kind of laid these out alongside the requirements.

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So I find having product requirements really, really helpful as a designer because it kind of tells me exactly what the design is supposed to support.

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I think this is a good example, actually, where we have this general requirement and then like within that is a few different priorities.

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P0 means like we absolutely have to support this and we have to build this.

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have any p1s but p1s and p2s are like nice to have

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or like fast follows so i would have like the requirements

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and then i would have the corresponding designs like as a flow next to it

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and i found this really helpful particularly for people coming in

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and like looking in my figma file on their own

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because it would give them the context of like oh okay these are the things

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that this flow is supporting and as you're looking at these flows like think to yourself is it meeting these

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that's just a look at like how I've kind of laid out more flows rather than like individual screen explorations.

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So as promised, as you just saw, that was a very messy, raw look at how I've sort of presented different explorations through different projects at two different companies.

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And you can see that my process is not like fixed.

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So as sort of mentioned in the beginning of this video, it really evolves and changes and adapts based on who the audience is,

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based on level of confidence I have in my decisions and in my explorations.

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some inspiration for how to try this with your projects and your team.

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Have a wonderful week and I will see you next time.

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Bye friend!

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Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

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