What prompted me to invent Design Critique Jam

Nihal Walia
CXgram
Published in
3 min readFeb 13, 2021

I have written a lot of times about the value of Design Critiques, culture and the value it gives to the Design Process.

As we all know the whole world suffered a big pandemic recently and the whole world stayed at home and started working from home only. Being at home was surely a safe option but it came up with a lot of problems and thus some rays of new opportunities.

Being an opportunist I winked upon one of those opportunities and started thinking about how to make Design critique scalable so that Designers can use it while sitting at homes.

Questions I had

Do we need an application for it or a meeting room?

Should we call people over phones to collaborate?

Or is it possible to do it or no?

These were some questions I had in my small pocket. I started figuring out how to involve people on the digital platform and how to make things more playful and engaging for all.

What I did

I discoverd a new idea — Design Critique Jam(Workshop).

I used the Figma tool and constructed one big Jam(workshop) template where all the designers could come and joined the event.

I included a lot of small nuggets which helped participants to gaze at the design solution’s stage and events.

Design Critique Jam Document

As the name suggests Design Critique Jam it should be very engaging for all the participants and also for the facilitator. So I introduced a new phenomenon. It had 3 categorical stickies which participants could use while critiquing the Designs- Critique tools.

It gave a point of interaction and engagement for the participants. Now they had something to do. Earlier they used to sit back and listen only but now they could really participate more actively.

Stickies to log feedback

During this journey, I faced one more problem. This was a new challenge which hit me hard. Eventually, I realised regular Design critique sessions in real-world had a very less Discover and Define documentation which could not help participants to come to the same page where the design solution was being developed. If participants were not good with the knowledge about the scope then how they would be critiquing the design rightly. Their feedback would be based on less awareness or they can not judge the solution perfectly.

Then I refined the template further and added Persona and CJM cut to the Jam document.

Persona Document
CJM template to be filled by the host

It was very well received by the real-world designers. I tested it out with different designers from different planets.

It was a thumbs up.

Going forward I invented UX metrics which could measure Design Critique Jam score with the help of voting. I used this concept in many projects and these metrics supported me a lot in client conversations to defend my design solutions every time.

Now the framework looks like

Discovery phase (Persona + CJM) + Critique Document + UX Metrics(Voting) = Design Critique Jam

I hope you find my invention useful. Please respond if you have any questions we talk through it.

I will write another blog or do a podcast to show how the whole process works.

Special thanks to cheena kaul for inspiring me throughout the journey.

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Nihal Walia
CXgram
Editor for

Good Design is like a fresh air, it let's users breathe.