I’ve had a somewhat adversarial relationship with design critiques throughout my career. I would sometimes take feedback personally, become frustrated if I got conflicting feedback, or feel as if people didn’t understand what problems I was trying to solve. I started by following some tried-and-true steps coworkers shared with me, but I still found myself occasionally having a difficult time communicating with people or feeling like the feedback I gave wasn’t useful to designers.

The breaking point

About a year ago I had a particularly rough design critique. …