Design crits — how we make better products by sharing openly
Design crits at Farewill are a fun, humbling and high impact part of our design process.
What is a crit?
A crit (short for critique) is a get-together of designers and others to share and comment on work-in-progress designs.
Farewill’s design crit takes place every Tuesday at 3pm. The format is fairly simple:
- On a Tuesday morning, anyone hoping to share something posts a brief description on our #design Slack channel. We use this to set our agenda.
- At the crit, the presenter gives some context — for example, about research, data, needs and whether the design is 30%, 60% or 90% done
- They say what sort of feedback they’re looking for — e.g. anything at all, or honing in on a specific feature
- They present the designs, then there’s a group discussion
- The presenter takes notes
Our crits are open to anyone. The Design Guild always attends and we’re almost always the ones sharing the designs. Other regular visitors are Tam and James, our product managers, and Dan, our CEO, plus developers like Charlotte.
It took us a few months to get comfortable with the crit format as a team. Now, we often have external guests. We recently welcomed visitors from Lloyds Bank, a product manager keen to see how we do things, and students considering a career in user research.
Our crit rules
To help our crits run smoothly we have 4 main rules. We stole them from Sarah Richards’ wonderful book, Content Design. They are:
- be respectful: everyone did the best job possible with the knowledge they had at the time
- only discuss the design / content, not the person who created it
- only give constructive criticism: ‘that’s crap’ is unhelpful and unacceptable
- no one has to defend a decision
We want everyone to be clear and direct, but to be nice. That’s an important part of the normalisation process: people will be less likely to share work in a crit if they don’t consider it a safe space.
An example
I recently brought some rough sketches for an internal tool I was working on for our probate team. They were 30% done, at most. In the spirit of vulnerability and sharing early, I used the crit to get feedback on some questionable ideas…
Feedback included:
- The way users need to mark sections as complete is confusing
- The dark, floating list of things to do is confusing too, and why is it at the bottom of the screen?
- Because it’s at the bottom, it could be a long way from the section header, which could make things unclear or less usable
- The ‘blob’ illustration is just ‘juice’ — a needless addition that could be off-putting for users
The feedback helped to nudge the designs forward, which meant when we tested them with users we weren’t doing so with half-baked ideas.
Thanks in part to the crit, the section above ended up looking more like this…
Making the most of a crit
I get the most out of a design crit when I share work at an early stage. Designs that are 30% can have a number of glaring problems. That’s ok! It’s good to root them out quickly — the crit is a great forum for doing that.
But it does mean being vulnerable and humble, and focusing on outcomes over ego. It’s important that sharing scrappy work is normalised, so everyone feels comfortable airing their dirty laundry. Crits are bad when they become an ego-stroking ‘show and tell’.
Giving a bit of context can be very helpful, but teammates will rarely know as much about the problem as the presenter. That’s ok — it’s fine to keep things subjective. The presenter can assess and cherry pick feedback depending on how it fits with evidence from users.
Much of my work has nudged forward or significantly improved by sharing early and openly at the crit. By sharing designs with my amazingly talented colleagues, I’ve learned a lot.
Part of a wider process
Our design crit is one part of a wider product design process. We start by identifying user needs and problems from user research (owned by our researcher Clare) and data. We articulate business requirements and work with stakeholders, PMs and developers from start to finish. We run a very open, collaborative process. We test our designs with users. We iterate. We measure.
The crit is no replacement or shortcut for any of this. But as part of a healthy, balanced design diet, it can be super useful.
As part of a healthy, balanced design diet, a crit can be super useful
Join the team!
Our crits are a fun, safe space which have helped me improve as a designer. If you’re a product designer, marketing designer, content designer or user researcher, keep a look out for creative jobs at Farewill — https://farewill.com/careers. We’d love you to join our team, and our next crit!
If you’d like to read more about crits, check out:
