Effective Design Critiques
How Establishing Culture-Based Review Standards is Helping Customer Experiences
By: Julia Trinidad, Senior User Experience Designer, Chase
Picture this: you are a user experience designer or content designer. You have worked diligently on an initiative with your team, you’ve tested your prototypes with a research partner at your side, and your team has come up with a product design that will solve one of your users’ biggest problems.
You begin your final review with stakeholders only to discover there are new constraints, old objections that were unresolved in past reviews, and an ever-growing volume of change requests sidelining your delivery schedule. Your stakeholders are confused — some of them are growing impatient by the lack of context provided for the meeting. Suddenly, the review you’d been looking forward to for weeks has soured, and you’ve been sent back into the trenches to rework your design once again.
Sometimes teams forge ahead with a product they can’t wait to release to their customers and bypass the critique process. However, without a disciplined review culture, they may leave important teammates like research experts behind, only tapping them retroactively when they need more information. When broken review cadences aren’t addressed, research can sometimes be excluded altogether. This inevitably leads to missed opportunities for customers who will ultimately interact with the product.
If you’ve ever experienced a fragmented review process, you might be wondering: how do we make this better?
Start with Culture
The answer lies in reforming UX review culture. Design critiques and research reviews are widely used methods for assessing work. However, when we receive out-of-scope, deconstructive, or ineffective feedback, it creates problems for everyone. From cross-partner tension to scope creep and swirl, clear guidance is needed to help teams achieve a common goal through reviews.
Through extensive research, the design team at Chase created a series of standardized guidelines for participants to learn how to give effective feedback, and for designers and researchers to learn how to facilitate more productive conversations. Input from our team, which consists of design, content design and research disciplines, produced findings that are not exclusive to the financial services industry.
Our goal is to help teams avoid biased feedback based on opinions or guesses, and instead focus on feedback grounded in facts and research that keeps the customer at the center of all that we do. Feedback that’s based on the established customer problem creates better products.
Small Shifts Make a Big Impact
For example, sending a well-crafted meeting invite can improve partner relationships, build trust and shorten UX delivery cycles. By sharing context, goals and outstanding items up front, teams saw massive and rapid improvements in their effectiveness as well as their confidence.
We have set up our teams for success by creating a review playbook that houses tools like:
· Structured and repeatable meeting agendas.
· A scope creep identifier for those unsure of how to push back against untimely suggestions.
· A meeting trimming tool to help stakeholders make the most effective use of time.
· A step-by-step guide to facilitating empowered reviews.
The result is a tested, structured and easy-to-follow tool that leads to constructive, disciplined feedback.
Test and Learn
By employing the methods within the tool, our test groups are seeing greater efficiency in gaining stakeholder alignment, vast improvements in meeting attendance by setting the right expectations before a review, and significant decreases in project timelines and scope creep. It’s also another way to facilitate a more inclusive workplace — more discipline re-establishes that all voices matter and reinforces inclusion by allowing them to be heard.
Even the most difficult stakeholder conversations saw improvement using these methods. In fact, several designers were so effective when using this playbook that they became the go-to experts for their partners and found their designs supported even in their absence. One designer reported that when their partners re-centered conversations around the customer they were able to discover six new opportunities for impactful improvements.
When it comes to reviews, not everything will be in our control, but there are rules and guidelines that can make them more successful. There is no better way to serve ourselves and our customers than to create environments that foster better collaboration through empowered communication.
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JPMorgan Chase is an Equal Opportunity Employer, including Disability/Veterans
For Informational/Educational Purposes Only: The opinions expressed in this article may differ from other employees and departments of JPMorgan Chase & Co. Opinions and strategies described may not be appropriate for everyone, and are not intended as specific advice/recommendation for any individual. You should carefully consider your needs and objectives before making any decisions, and consult the appropriate professional(s). Outlooks and past performance are not guarantees of future results.
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