I think no one wants others casually critique about their works. While good critique help us improve our design. We need good critique.
What is the criteria for design critiques? I search online, someone said there are eight criteria：1 Color comfort 2 The primary and secondary text 3 Information readability 4 UI identification 5 Thought, communication of life 6 Tiny details and tiny ideas 8 References to the way of expression in life
I think it’s make sense to evaluate designs from these eight perspectives.
What design critiques means to me
•Find problem about my design
Everyone has their own perspective of looking at the problem. By giving your design to others, they will help you find out the problem you haven’t find. Designers tend to be trapped in their own designs and forget their original intentions.
I have a homework that is asked to do an app about dinner reservation.
There are the pain points what we find during the interview and the interface design：
If you put the two things together, you will easily to find that my interface design has broken away from my survey. But I haven’t find the big problem until the professor told me. Because I put everything together, it made me unable to find this problem for the first time, but if I give my design to anyone who understands design, they can easily find this serious problem.
•Get small inspiration from their words
Maybe your design will trigger some good ideas from others. When you communicate with each other, you can have more inspiration.
•When I give others design critiques, I also think whether my design also have that problem.
When we first started using Axure to do our assignment, many people forget to set a link back to the previous page or to the next page. That let other students pay more attention to it when they do there own work.
What should we pay attention to when give others design critiques?
•From the user’s point of view
People who give the design critiques maybe not the person who will use the product. For example, the app is for people who feel bored when waiting for the doctor in the hospital. Someone who may not feel bored when waiting, if he or she just use their own view to evaluate the design, he or she may ask “Why don’t they play mobile phones or watch TV when they are not waiting？”. Obviously, such a problem is meaningless to this design.
•Use the right words
I ready an article about the design critiques and it says that “Good critique uses Socratic questions”. It means that do not say something like “Your shouldn’t use that colour” or “This icon is not compliant“, you can say “don’t you think there maybe more colour you can try” or “Do you think this icon has anything to do with your theme? What methods can make your icon and theme more relevant?”
This kind of words not only makes people more acceptable, but also inspires the designer’s thinking and makes the design better.
In general, let more people know about your design, give you more suggestions, make your design have more opportunities to become better.
