Stop 13 · Design Portfolio StrategyTopics · 6/7

Writing About Your Design Decisions

In short

Two designers can show the same screen. The one who explains clearly why each choice was made is the one who gets hired. Your words carry your thinking.

Clear, concise written explanations of why you made specific choices — the writing quality of a case study often matters as much as the visual design itself for communicating your thinking.

The jaadu speaks into a microphone on a railway platform with a train behind.

Think of it like this

A good station announcement

'The express is late' leaves everyone annoyed. 'The express is 40 minutes late due to fog, now arriving on platform 3' tells you what changed, why, and what to do. Write about design decisions like a good announcement.

Watch it happen

How to write one design decision

Context

Options

Decision

Reason

Result

1/5Context: what users were struggling with at this point. One sentence.

The big ideas

What you need to know

Short beats clever

Plain sentences and short paragraphs. Reviewers skim, so get to the point fast.

Say 'I' for your part

Use 'I' for what you did and 'we' for team work. Be clear and honest about both.

Use evidence

A user quote or test result is stronger than 'I felt this was cleaner'.

Proofread

Typos make careful work look careless. Read it aloud or ask a friend to check.

See it in code

Walk through the code

text

1Before:2"I made the button bigger and changed the colour3to make it better."4 5After:6"In tests, 4 of 6 users missed 'Book seat' below the7fold. I moved it into a sticky bottom bar and gave it8the primary colour. In the second round, all 6 found9it within 5 seconds."

1/4Vague: 'better' tells the reader nothing about why.

The same change written twice. The second version gives the problem, the decision, the reason and the result in four lines.

Save yourself the pain

Common mistakes

Oops

Writing long, formal paragraphs full of buzzwords.

Do this instead

Write like you'd explain it to a smart friend. Short sentences, real examples.

Oops

Describing what the screen shows instead of why.

Do this instead

The image already shows what. Use the words to explain why, and what it changed.

Your mission

Rewrite three decisions

~25 min

Quick check

Which sentence best explains a design decision?

Go deeper

1Write a paragraph explaining the reasoning behind one specific design decision, in plain language.
2Learn to avoid vague statements ('I made it more user-friendly') in favor of specific reasoning.
3Practice reading your case study writing aloud to catch awkward or unclear phrasing.