I wrote this on Hatch on December 9, 2014, presented here with minor edits for clarification. See Hatching Inside Medium for context on this collection.
Product & Design Feedback
I feel fortunate that as an engineer here, I have the opportunity to work closely with designers. This doesn’t happen everywhere. Medium has established a great way for people from different domains to work together.
As an application engineer, I can sit down with Marcin and work on typography. Xiao from engineering and Luke from user happiness can push forward on making more translations available to more people. Just to list a few examples.
At Medium, we have some formalized ways to provide product & design feedback (e.g. DCT, design office hours, #design). We can do even better, but we can’t solve all of it at once. I will be using this collection as a means to writing down thoughts on our product and design. The intention is to complement our current system.
I invite you to write up your thoughts with the below guidelines and share them here as well.
About this collection
These are some vectors of communication organically in our culture already, but I’ve re-iterated them here in the context of this collection.
Mindful feedback
In this case, the purpose of feedback is to improve what we’re working on and how we’re working on it. The two fastest ways to give feedback is in person or a quick chat message. These are rarely thoroughly thought out. I know when I was writing Beautiful Homepage, I caught myself in many instances and asked “Is this sentence helpful?” Writing everything down helps build out the ideas.
Direct feedback
Relatedly, your primary audience should be those who are actively working on the solution to the problem. Once you’ve written up a draft of your feedback, bring it to your audience and chat about it. Your written feedback should inform that conversation.
Once you’ve talked about it, publish to this collection so the rest of the organization can learn from this feedback. Someone else out there is probably thinking the same things, and this way they can join the conversation, too.
Actionable feedback
At the various stages of a project, useful feedback is different. For an early stage prototype or mock, “I wish we showed the posts in a list instead of as tiles,” is very actionable. For a version 2 productionized implementation, it is not so much. Feedback that is actionable is the most useful to the project in the short term.
Constructive feedback
I will be using the “I like, I wish, I wonder” format. Jean introduced this to Medium a while ago. This was originally from the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design and is now used at many places as a system that encourages constructive feedback. Like everything else, there are exceptions. Choose the format that best communicates your thoughts!
Guidelines
Here is a suggested workflow.
- Write up a draft of your feedback. (“I like, I wish, I wonder…”)
- Send your draft to the team working on that part of the product.
- Talk over your feedback with that team.
- Publish your feedback so the org as a whole can learn from them.
That’s it! Feedback away!
