How to get really good feedback

You can redesign critiques to make them healthier

Getting good feedback does not come up much in Why Design Is Hard. It’s a short book and this topic didn’t make the cut in your votes for the toughest situations. But if there is an updated edition of the book I’d add it to the list. Why? It makes design harder if the feedback you get is painful and useless.

Thanks to the poll, I know 20% of you already read the book: this bonus material is for you (and for everyone else too of course, but you are my favorites by far).

I’ve written a great deal about creative feedback and the most important lesson is that as a designer you most lead your feedback process. No one probably told you this, but it is your job to figure out how to get the useful feedback you need to do your work. This includes feedback from peers, leaders, fellow designers, engineers, customers, anyone.

If you don’t take ownership of feedback you will be a feedback victim. You will learn key information late in your process. You will be victimized by dumb, broken feedback sessions led by people who have their own agendas and ignorances. But if you do it right, your work will be easier and your ideas will get better.

The three terrible types of feedback sessions

It helps to give names to situations we want to avoid. Plus, it’s fun to talk about things going wrong for other people, isn’t it? Or do I need to see a therapist? Don’t answer that (I do already see one though). The three terrible and popular kinds of feedback sessions are:

1. The bloodbath. The designer shows their work, but the room is filled with two or more polarized factions fighting with each other. These groups are motivated to hate, or love, the design for reasons that have little to do with the actual work or the designer. The factions fight a long and tough battle and the designer gets caught in the crossfire. Fun times.

2. Water torture. One vulnerable, innocent person is foolish enough to show their work. Like circling vultures, everyone takes turn swooping in to poke holes and it becomes a mean spirited competition. The designer feels like a victim, struggling to breathe. It’s a lesson to everyone to avoid critiques and feedback sessions at all costs as they are clearly just a kind of punishment.

3. The Dog and Pony Show. It’s all a charade. The real decisions have already been made and the feedback session is just for show, or to be able to say “we got feedback.”

In a short, funny talk I gave years ago called Feedback Without Frustration (video), I explain why these are common and how to avoid them.

The real goal is to learn

In the talk I explain that the goal of of feedback is to understand your own work better. The goal is not to get a perfect score, nor to impress anyone. Those are kinds of dog and pony shows.

The best feedback sessions help you to:

1. Ask better questions about the project

2. Gain insights from different perspectives

3. Challenge your assumptions and constraints

4. Help you make better decisions about what to do next

It’s important to note nothing in this list controls what you decide. Maybe you change nothing. Maybe you change everything. That’s up to you.

This also means it’s the goal of everyone else in the session to help you, as the designer, get these things. Their motivation should be to give you feedback that is useful to you, which likely includes respectfully telling you things you might not prefer to hear, but you need to hear anyway. It might hurt a little to hear these things, but learning and growing often requires it. The surefire way to stagnate as a designer is to never hear anything you don’t want to hear about your work.

Use ground rules

Many of the rules I see for feedback/critique sessions are so generic that they’re easy to corrupt. I don’t believe in complement sandwiches as they are an easy way to hide passive aggressive abuse (e.g. nice thing, terrible cruel unnecessary thing, nice thing). From my long, and in retrospect quite dull, essay on How To Run A Design Critique, I offer a basic set of ground rules to use.

Start with clarifying the goals. As the designer, it’s up to you to define what kinds of feedback are off limits (note: low-fi mockups will generate different feedback than hi-fi). Give everyone clear boundaries and goals. Clarify any assumptions about what the presented design is intended to do (for customers), or what kind of experience it is intended to create. Hopefully, this intent is derived from the overall project goals, which is already agreed upon.

The general rules for the room are:

1. Ask clarifying questions before speaking. Many times in work environments, we confuse conversations, which should be exchanges of ideas, with opportunities to inflict our opinions on others. If you take a moment to listen and understand before voicing an opinion, you’re open to hear something new that might challenge your old thinking. So don’t just wait for other people to finish, actively try to understand what’s being said, and reflect it back to the speaker.

2. Lead into explorations of alternatives. Ask questions that surface other choices the designer might not have recognized. Postpone judgments, unless there are obvious gaps between the designers intent, and the designs you are critiquing.

3. If it fits with the goals of the critique, point out situations, sequences, or elements within the design that may be problematic given what you know about your customers, the scenarios involved, or the project goals.

4. Avoid statements that refer to absolutes. Instead, make points referent to the goals of the design. Bad example: “This sucks and it’s ugly”. Good: “Well, if the goal is to make this feel friendly, black and flaming red skulls doesn’t convey that to me.” Bad: “How could anyone figure that out?” Good: “I think there’s something missing between step 3 and 4. It’s not clear to me what the sequence of operations is.  How do you expect people to know where to click?”

5. Speak in context of your point of view. It’s fine to have a personal opinion, expressing your own preferences. But don’t confuse this with your perception of what your customers need or want. So make sure to specify which kind of opinion you’re offering (e.g. “I hate red”, “Customer data suggests they hate red”). Hopefully there is data and research to help everyone agree on the likely customer perspective on different ideas.

Leaders define the (feedback) culture

In the end, the most powerful person in the room sets the tone. They can break any rule they want and it’s hard to stop them. This is why “official” ground rules have limited value. The real ground rules are demonstrated by how leaders behave and what behavior by others they reward or punish.

A topic for a future post could be: what can I do if my leaders are terrible at giving creative feedback? If you want that, leave a comment. Thanks for reading this far.

I await your feedback on my feedback advice.