Understanding how to prioritize makes you a more effective designer

Everything can’t be the top priority, or else nothing is

“So…who am I supposed to prioritize?” I said in response to a ridiculous requirements spreadsheet.

User needs for two distinct user groups were mashed together on there. One user group included people who had just gotten a bachelor’s degree, and the other included users with 10+ years of experience. While their needs weren’t exactly at odds, lumping them together created a whole lot of chaos.

However, rather than focus on the spreadsheet, I want to focus on the prioritization question.

That’s because Designers are often bad at asking that question while they work.

When everything is the top priority, nothing is

I’ve met designers who presented 25 user findings, with each finding being a critical priority. I’ve also met designers who would try to build a single design for multiple user groups.

Not to mention designers who build portfolios, including two pages of context before discussing what you did.

It never works. While that might have been okay in 2019, the state of UX in 2025 is so different that these methods do not work.

You need to consider priorities now more than ever for a couple of reasons:

• You are likely stretched a little thin or have limited budgets
• UX needs to justify its value to business instead of just being a craft
• You don’t have the resources to fix everything

So, what often stops designers from prioritizing? In many cases, it’s fear of making a decision.

Whether you believe ‘prioritization is a Product Manager’s job” or “I’m terrified of suggesting the wrong thing,” this fear often paralyzes designers from making reasonable requests that are more likely to be approved.

If that’s the case, here’s what can help.

You’re not talking to an “audience.” You’re targeting a person

Can you imagine what would happen if products were developed with a generic category of “users” in mind?

It wouldn’t work. That’s why we often separate user roles using design artifacts like personas, user journey maps, and storyboarding.

Yet, many designers do that when presenting to their team. Whether they’re your direct manager, a 3rd party recruiter, or the company’s CEO, we often lump them into the category of “audience.”

Instead, what we need to be doing is picking a specific person to target. This target, as it turns out, is often the decision-maker that falls into one of four categories:

Approval: Product Managers might Approve Design recommendations

Access: VP’s or Executives might give access to specialized users/software

Resources: Interviewers or Hiring managers might give resources to you (i.e. hire you)

Knowledge: Engineers/Subject Matter Experts might give knowledge about the back-end.

That doesn’t mean we should ignore questions or feedback from the rest of the team. However, when you go into a presentation with a specific audience member in mind, you are forced to prioritize what the person needs to know.

Perhaps you must spend more time establishing context if you’re targeting the CEO, who only checks up on this project once a month.

Or, maybe you don’t spend much time in the background if you’re targeting the product manager who sees this project daily.

Whatever the case, once we’ve narrowed down the audience, we can do something specific: give recommendations.

Recommendations, not orders

It’s almost certain that the person you’re presenting to outranks you in the organization.

Whether it’s a Product Manager or CEO, you can’t order them around based on authority.

But you don’t need to. If you’re afraid of giving the wrong suggestion, remember that you’re giving recommendations. The best way to think about this is to imagine yourself as a waiter.

You might suggest the special of the day (“Flank Steak”) to your customers, but that doesn’t prevent them from ordering the Salmon instead. Likewise, you aren’t giving your team orders on what to do.

Instead, you give your recommendations based on what you observed and your expert opinion, which your Product Manager might follow (or not). As a result, taking the time to prioritize what you recommend or the best course of action (in your opinion), shouldn’t feel high stakes.

But if you’re still unsure, lean into options analysis.

Options Analysis, or carefully laying out three choices

This is the step that many design agencies jump to to avoid the pressure of recommendation.

However, it should be used sparingly because it can cause many issues. The idea is simple: you usually lay out three specific options, and then the person in charge chooses one of them to go with.

Simple enough? Well, even in these cases, you still want to give your recommendation.

Otherwise, you’re relying on someone seeing your design for the first time to choose an option.

Instead, you need to spend enough time laying out the “Pros” and “Cons” of each situation, along with your recommendation, to ensure that the person deciding this choice has as much information as possible.

Doing these things can help designers learn how to prioritize.

UX can’t live in a vacuum anymore

A lot of what you learn in school is about being comprehensive and objective. The idea is to create these 100-page usability reports that correctly identify every issue from only a UX perspective.

I’ve seen those 100-page usability reports being door-stops as a result.

While thinking deeply about UX is a valuable skill, nothing will get done if you can’t prioritize which issues are most critical.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you become a Product Manager or order people around. It just means that you have a strong opinion on what needs to be done and think about what is most critical for the project.

Learning to prioritize and work under constraints allows you to not only see things from a business perspective: it’s a critical skill you’ll need to learn to grow as a designer.

So don’t make the same mistakes others do, lumping everything together. Practice prioritization and you might be able to make more of a difference.

Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and Data and Design newsletter writer. He teaches a course, Data-Informed Design, on becoming a more effective designer using the power of Data.