DSN 325 · UI Design & Design Systems · Week 7 of 7

Tell the Story

The pitch, the case study, and the last critique. Everything you made becomes the argument.

The Investment Committee doesn't grade effort. They grade whether you can show a problem, a working answer, and the judgment in between. This week you package seven weeks of decisions into ten slides, one case study, and one demo that works on the first click.

This week at a glance

Fri 11:59 pmFinal Project: pitch deck (≤10 slides) + working prototype link + design system file + case study + presentation recording
Fri 11:59 pmFinal Discussion: post your case study + the decision you're proudest of and the one you're unsure about
Sun 11:59 pmReplies: structured critique of 2 classmates

1The pitch deck: ten slides, one job

A shape that works

  1. The problem — the specific person and breakdown from your Week 1 proposal
  2. Who it hurts — your audience and what blocks them today
  3. The solution — your MVP in one sentence and one screen
  4. The demo — your working flow (link on the slide; you'll walk it in the recording)
  5. How it handles reality — your empty, loading, and error states. Committees notice what breaks; show them nothing does
  6. The system — your tokens and components, and why consistency makes this scale
  7. Built for everyone — your accessibility results, with the numbers
  8. How it was made — your process: hand-built foundations, AI-directed build, what you rejected
  9. The constraint — how you honored your sector's technical constraint
  10. What's next — what you'd build with funding

Ten is the ceiling, not the target. Every slide: one idea, big type, almost no words. You are the words — the slides are evidence.

Slides that carry vs. slides that bury

The committee reads a slide in three seconds or not at all.

Do — one idea, readable across the room
Don't — a document pretending to be a slide

2The case study: decisions, not screens

The seven parts

  1. Hero — the product in one image, the problem in one line
  2. Overview — sector, constraint, your role, the seven-week arc, in one short block. Name it honestly: "a seven-week course brief structured as an incubator RFP." Hiring managers don't mind fictional clients; they mind discovering it themselves
  3. The problem — who, what breaks, why it matters
  4. The process — foundations → kit → flows → build. Show the work evolving; before/afters beat finals
  5. The judgment — your best rejections: what AI produced, what you caught, what you changed and why. Pull straight from your orchestration and QA logs — this is the section hiring managers slow down for
  6. The result — the working flow, the edge states, the accessibility numbers, and what happened when real people ran it: quote your peer test-drives from Week 6, including what broke and what you fixed
  7. What I learned — honest, specific, short

Your Field Work scouting told you where readers stop. Write so they don't: front-load the story, caption every image, cut anything you'd skim.

The trap this week: narrating instead of arguing. "First I made a style tile, then I made components…" is a diary. "The committee needed proof the product could survive a failed request — here's the error recovery I built and the three versions I rejected" is a case. Every section should answer: what did you decide, and why was it right?

3The last critique

Post your case study Friday with two honest flags: the decision you're proudest of, and the one you're not sure about. Then critique two classmates by Sunday — the same structured way you've done all term, one last time at full strength. Name what's strongest, name what's weakest, end with one specific improvement they could make in an hour. That habit — sharp, kind, specific — is the most portable thing this course gives you.

4How to do this week's work

  1. Final QA sweep first. Click your whole flow in a private window. Check every link you're about to submit. Broken links read as broken products.
  2. Write the case study before the deck. The case study finds your story; the deck compresses it.
  3. Build the deck from the shape above. Use your own design system on the slides — the deck is also a craft sample, and the committee knows it.
  4. Record the presentation. Walk the deck and demo the working flow, ten minutes or less. Rehearse once, record twice, submit the better one.
  5. Package the five deliverables: deck, prototype link, design system file (organized pages, named layers), case study, recording. Test every link in a private window.
  6. Post to the final discussion Friday; critique two classmates by Sunday. Finish the way you started: eyes sharp.
AI this week: use it to tighten writing, draft slide copy, or rehearse Q&A — and disclose it, one last time. The story itself has to be yours. You're the only one who was there for the decisions.

5Resources

Everything here is free. Start with the starred items.

6Before you submit