Conducting Effective Design Critiques with Your Team
Every designer has experienced it — the pain of a critique that felt like a firing squad. Where someone slammed your work, and maybe even you. Where the feedback was vague or completely off-topic and you ended up with more questions than answers. Where you came out feeling like a failure. It’s why most designers hate critique sessions and would rather avoid them. But getting feedback on work is critical, not just for the success of projects, but for the growth and development of designers.
So how do we ensure that critiques are effective and professional?
At their core, critiques are a form of communication. To be effective, good communication requires a few things from all participants. When presenting, designers need to share relevant information clearly. While listening, participants need to give the speaker their attention and ask for clarification when needed. And all parties need to generally agree on appropriate etiquette for the conversation.
Based on discussions with peers and colleagues, I’ve summed up some basic practices for effective critiques and organized them by the role of the participants.
The (Meeting) Manager Sets the Tone
Every critique, or crit, session has a “leader”. That could be the group manager, the most senior designer in the room, the person who scheduled the session, or just the presenter themselves. That person has an important role to play in setting the tone for critiques. How a leader provides or solicits feedback demonstrates what is and is not appropriate or helpful.
Keep it professional
It should go without saying, but the point of a critique is to provide feedback on the work, not judge the person. And while most of us go in with the right intentions, we can fall back on conversational patterns. In crits, the biggest pitfall is in how we phrase issues we want to raise. For example, if we see a button that we think is not well placed, we might ask “Why did you put the button there?” or say “You should have put the button here instead.” In both of those statements, the focus is on the person and what they did or didn’t do. But what we really care about is the button. A bit of rephrasing can ensure the focus stays on the work. Then the question becomes “Why is the submit button above the form fields?” and the statement changes to “I’m used to seeing buttons below the form field, as submitting is the last step in filling out a form. That’s what users will likely expect from other experiences.”
Keep it flowing
For better or worse, designers can get REALLY into a problem. I’ve seen designers fill a wall with dozens of ways to build a single interaction or talk in circles about the pros and cons of different approaches. This can be great for getting the creative juices flowing, but in a crit session, it can derail a conversation. Be aware of when the group is spinning its wheels on a problem and suggest tabling a discussion that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. This is especially important when there are outstanding questions that the presenting designer doesn’t have the answers for yet and may be getting frustrated. This will help manage time flow, so everyone looking for feedback gets their fair share of time.
On the flip side, sometimes the presenter asks a question and gets crickets in response. Again, it’s part of the crit leader’s job to help get things flowing. If necessary, gently remind folks to give the session their full attention. If there are individuals that aren’t saying much, find ways to encourage them to speak up. I like to direct questions to a team member that I know has worked on something similar whenever possible, as this helps the team make those cross-team connections.
Don’t forget the positive feedback
Okay, we’re all familiar with the “shit sandwich” where negative feedback is given in between positive feedback in order to soften the blow. I’m not suggesting we do that — most of us can spot insincere positive feedback from a mile away. But genuine positive feedback is important to give in its own right because we need to promote designs that work as much as correct the ones that don’t. If we don’t highlight good designs, then time and energy may be wasted on work that could already be considered done. You could even end up with a design that is less effective than the early iteration, risking the success of the project.
Allison Bright from the design agency Expand the Room, also points out that it’s important for ensuring the designer’s growth and effectiveness. “I always start with positive [feedback]. It goes such a long way towards building confidence and empowering your designer. You can really suck the wind out of someone’s sails if you aren’t approaching that correctly.”
Encourage openness
Sometimes presenters are resistant to feedback, no matter how well framed it is. It might feel like having others involved in their work takes away some of their agency. Help designers see feedback sessions as not just a required step, but as something more positive — a tool they can use to take their work to the next level.
Allison describes, “This is a team sport. I understand that sense of ownership and pride, but you run a lot of risk, because you’re so close to it that you can’t see everything. You are one thought pattern. You want a team to bring all these other ideas. You may have the support, the input, the collective energy of your team, but you’re still the backbone and have ownership.”
The Presenter Shares the Context
Once the stage is set, the designer presenting their work is in the spotlight. The single best thing an individual designer can do to ensure they get helpful feedback in a critique is to start by setting the context.
Give the Background
Let’s be honest, we often get so absorbed in our work that we lose track of how much went into getting a design to its current state — all the questions asked, requirements or limitations noted, ideas considered and discarded. We forget that our teammates, working on their own projects, didn’t go on that journey with us. This means it’s the presenter’s job to give everyone the background and guardrails first before they give feedback.
At Glassdoor, some teams do this with intro slides — one page that gives the project’s stage, target audience, problem to be solved or goal, and some guidance speaking to areas where you’d most like help.
Another approach, shared by Stella Ding of Salesforce, is putting color-coded notes next to her mocks that highlight key information that influenced her work. She uses yellow for technical limitations, blue for UX questions, and so on. This technique helps her manage expectations from reviewers and remind them of the constraints she’s working within.
But not too much!
But there’s kind of a catch with setting the stage for your work. Yes, reviewers need the background, but if you try to give them everything, that often ends up being more than they can absorb. It can also take up more time than you have. So spend a bit of time thinking about how to summarize the problem you’re solving before asking for feedback. It helps ensure that you’re clear on what issues you want to discuss so you can direct the conversation. My fellow design manager at Glassdoor, Arvi Raquel-Santos shared that “If they can’t explain the problem, then they don’t understand it well enough themselves. This can lead to frustrating crit sessions because there’s a disconnect between them and the reviewers on what we’re trying to solve for.”
Bonus: this is also great practice for those big presentations to clients and leadership teams.
Questions
One of the biggest frustrations designers have with critiques is getting irrelevant feedback. Making sure your audience has the appropriate background will help curtail this, but another step you should employ is explicitly asking for the feedback you do want. By giving your audience something to focus on, you’re directing their attention to the areas that will be most productive. This can be done in lots of ways, but I find it’s most effective when it’s done visually. You can throw up a slide or list of questions before starting if your questions are more general or high level, or you can note them in line — highlighting specific interactions or widgets you have questions about.
The Reviewers Bring the Why
As an audience participant in a crit session, it can feel like your role is very passive — you’re just following the lead that the manager and the speaker set. But your role is far more important than that. After all, without others to provide the critique, there’s not much point to having a review.
The most important thing to remember about your role as a reviewer is that what you’re really sharing is your brainpower. So when sharing your opinion that a different approach might be more effective, don’t forget to explain why you hold that opinion. You may have information that the presenter doesn’t, or you may have a use case front-of-mind that the presenter hasn’t considered yet. So it isn’t about the fact that you think the logo should be bigger, but the fact that you think the company name isn’t legible, or the logo is competing for attention with the header and therefore you would make the logo bigger to compensate. Bringing the why helps move the conversation forward. Now it’s not about one person’s opinion, but the impact of different elements of the design. You’ve given the presenter additional information that they can respond to and work with.
Like any form of communication, taking a few simple steps to help things run smoothly can make critique sessions more effective and more satisfying for everyone involved. If you’d like to go deep on ideas for running more effective reviews, I highly recommend the book Discussing Design by Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry.
