Don’t let stakeholders bumble through the mockup of your cool new feature. Control the narrative of your UX designs by switching your deliverables to videos (yes, videos).

Any mockup is basically a quick way to tell a narrative about a feature, a flow, or an experience. We can use static images, and they’re inadequate; they lack context unless we’re with the person while they’re looking at them (rare). In a pinch they work, for quick projects they’re fine, but for a flow or story…? Not so much.

Click-through mockups are inadequate
Click-through mockups have always been associated with UX, but they’re a strange deliverable. It’s an image, with one tiny part that’s clickable. Which is completely unlike the product you are trying to build for, and pretty far removed from  the experience of any end user. The designer can’t control the way the user (in this case a Product Manager or Developer) moves through the mockups (maybe they can’t find a link, or think the flow is finished).

Give the gift of a short (2-3) minute video
Videos are extremely effective at telling a story to a wide-range of viewers. Many people looking at images won’t have the full context. And since user experience is all about context, it’s critical to making judgements about how a story is told. With a narrated video, the designer can give the viewer a detailed context; act a a guide; point out features; and most importantly, control the narrative.

Why the narrative matters
The narrative is all you have. As a UX designer. As a designer selling a vision or feature for a product. The narrative is the emotional core of what you’re proposing. The emotional experience being one of ease and improvement. Life is better with this new feature. And if your Product Manager can’t find the $^#% link then guess what happens to your tidy story of ease and betterment? Guess what happens to that cool new feature you dreamed up on Sunday at the park, and all that work that you did after work because you believed in what you were doing – that right, it goes nowhere, like your career if you don’t start upping your game and following my sounds and reasonable advice to make videos as deliverables.

Example
Here’s a video I made to help sell a new feature I dreamed up, designed and implemented in CSS media queries

PM-Dashboard-Newsfeed from Jonathan Simmons on Vimeo.