How not to give design feedback
Say you’re out on a hot date.
You are out for dinner and as soon as you are seated, you are handed the menu. Flustered as you are, you can’t seem to get your head straight.
So you look to your waiter and say, “Surprise us with your house special”.
Looking back at your beautiful date, you smile, self-assured in your decision.
Shortly after, an irresistible aroma surrounds you. It’s a sinful chicken curry waiting to be dug into. But -
Your date’s a vegan.
Informing the waiter of this discovery, you try to continue the conversation and ignore your growing hunger and that big tip.
The waiter comes back with pasta. You eagerly take a big bite. Next thing you know, you feel your tongue start to swell up and upon asking, get to know of pine nuts in the dish.
You’re allergic to those little critters.
Silently crying on your way to the restroom, you wonder how it got to this stage in the evening. By the end of the night, you’ve managed to end up with a bad dinner, an over-enthusiastic stomach and no romantic success in sight.
Three strikes.
Sounds silly, doesn’t it? Because it is.
No one orders like this.
And yet, in giving design feedback, people tend to follow a very similar theme. Here are a few commonly used phrases which designers are subjected to while soliciting feedback:
1. “I don’t think this is intuitive enough”
This button? Not intuitive.
That icon? Not intuitive.
How about this checkout flow? Not intuitive enough.
This is usually the go-to line if you’re unsure but want to say something smart. It absolves the feedback giver of any responsibility and leaves the designer in dark to figure things out. Alas, we are not mind-readers.
Resist the urge to pass snap judgements while evaluating a design. Think about what works or not and communicate it explicitly.
2. “Show me something new”
We’re seeing an unprecedented amount of homogeneity across interface design paradigms.
This is good as people have come to expect existing behaviours in interfaces — the Facebook like, the Tinder swipe, the Snapchat stories.
However, there’s one word that ticks off this familiarity in the minds of product owners — novelty (not to be confused with innovation). Sure, you want your product’s interface to stand out. But novelty is not the only goal while designing the product. Just because it looks new and different doesn’t mean that it will work. (Hi, Snapchat).
Stick to the basics in order to improve your product.
3. “But (insert unicorn) does this…”
You’ve hired a designer/agency to help redesign your product. We’re not here to sabotage your product. On the contrary, we value improving the lives of your users (if not, we’d be out of a job).
This involves taking into a consideration a lot of different perspectives to reach a solution. It may not be how other apps deal with the problem, but it doesn’t need to be.
Your product’s goals are different from Facebook’s or Instagram’s. Stop lazily referencing them at every attempt.
Instead, understand why they made such a choice before citing them as feedback.
4. “You’re the designer, you tell me.”
There are multiple ways to solve a problem. We arrive at these solutions through a set of assumptions by surfacing and testing them until we narrow down to a select few.
This is where decision-making is critical and needs to be independent of the designer’s subjectivity. Asking a designer their preference, risks subjecting yourself to the anchoring bias effect.
Anchoring bias is the tendency to rely too heavily on the first set of information offered (known as the anchor) while making decisions.
So how should you decide? Well, rely on data rather than instincts. Specifically, use A/B testing to decide which of the solutions performs the best. Although not to this extent.
We’re here to find the right answers, not know them.
Feedback is subjective. But ambiguous and vague statements only make things frustrating. So the next time you’re asked to give design feedback, try to avoid these common mistakes. You’ll end up making better decisions for your product and users.
We at Brewex craft digital experiences that delight and are simple to use. We have fun, design obsessively and stay humble. Let’s build something awesome, together.
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