Elevate your designs with collaboration & critique

The power of Design Jams and Critiques to unlock creativity and elevate designs, solutions, and products is well-known. These processes offer fresh perspectives, break creative blocks, and push us beyond our comfort zones.

Collaborative Design Session

We all know that cross-functional has become the cornerstone of the design process as it enables the team to benefit from a range of perspectives such as research, product and engineering. And while I am a huge advocate for collaborating with other disciplines, what I often find lacking in “the design process” is, ironically, design-specific collaboration. Hear me out.

In my experience on projects, I typically am either working as the solo designer, or if I’m lucky will have one other designer to collaborate with. Maybe two. And what we miss out in this scenario is tapping into the wider design team’s collective knowledge.

Engaging in collaborative sessions with these fellow designers allows me to tap into their deep knowledge and expertise when needed and share back my experience with other product teams. Especially when it comes to niche design-specialities like design systems, motion design and user research.

These collaborative sessions between designers (or stakeholders) usually fall into one of three buckets:

1. Informative Sessions: These involve sharing knowledge and insights that may be useful for others in their current or future projects. Examples could be insights into accessibility from a recent project, showcasing a design system update, or sharing a newly launched product feature.
2. Problem-Solving Sessions: When facing challenges or feeling stuck on a particular product or feature, problem-solving sessions help generate new ideas and find solutions. The approach could be more exploratory and inspiration or problem-solving driven, depending on which stage of the design process you’re in.
3. Feedback Sessions: These sessions involve seeking feedback on sketches, concepts, or designs to make sure solutions are well considered. These are critical by nature and look to uncover missing gaps, improve areas of the experience and give actionable feedback.

Image: Overview of Design Playback, Design Jam and Design Critique with icons.

All three of these design collaboration sessions are equally valuable. Each with their own purpose has a unique role and place within the design process and brings value to the designer, and wider design teams within the org.

Before diving into the details of these sessions, it’s essential to clarify what they are not. They are not meant for:

• Making significant product decisions, which should always involve relevant stakeholders from the product teams.
• Negative comments or personal attacks. They should be constructive.

Alright, let’s delve into the specifics of these sessions…

Example of Design Playback

Design Playback: Knowledge Sharing

Informative sessions revolve around knowledge sharing, up-skilling, discussing challenges, and sharing project information. These are less about showcasing your own product and more about contributing to the design team’s collective growth. Examples of topics could include insights into accessibility, design system updates, or new product features.

There really is no right or wrong way to run this knowledge-share, but from experience presentations with some audience interaction and Q&A tends to work well. They can be held regularly with team members signing up to present. The format could range from short run-throughs to more extended sessions, depending on the importance of the information being shared.

🕦 Time: Anywhere from 15–45 minutes.
👩 People: As many as can make it. Record these sessions to share with those who can’t make it (Optional).
📝 Template: Design Playback template to get started →

Example of Design Jam

Design Jam’s: Problem Solving & Inspiration

Working on your own (at least in many cases) it’s easy to get into your own head, get stuck and hit a wall. Sometimes imposter syndrome kicks in and the problem feels unsolvable. This, my friend, is where a design jam is perfect.

Design jams are like high-energy brainstorming and ideation sessions, focused on solving specific design problems and work at any stage of the design process. By bringing together new ideas from various perspectives you’re usually able to riff off each other’s ideas and create something exciting and new to help solve the problem at hand.

I personally love them — they’re my favourite design session of the lot.

There are two key formats which I have seen work well for design jam’s:

• Lightning Demos: Seeking inspiration from other sources and examining how competitors and other brands approach similar challenges.
• Concept Creation: Jumping right into creating solutions based on personal experiences and inspiration. You can use a format like Crazy 8’s or Sketch Storming followed by voting or feedback methods like ‘I like, I wish, I wonder’ can be used to refine concepts further.

🕦 Time: 30 minutes to 2+hours. Depending on the problem a Jam might last a few hours.
👩 People: Keep the group small. 2–4 people is generally a good number.
📝 Template: Design Jam template to get started →

Image: Example of Design Critique

Design Critiques: Feedback

Design critique’s are perhaps the most well known, these are feedback sessions to share your work and gather input on the desirability, feasibility and viability of your design. They play an important part in the design process to ensure high quality design outputs and elevate the deliverables through the design-hive mind.

Various formats, such as Silent Critiques, Async Critiques (great across time-zones), or Round Table / Paper-Print Out Critiques, can be adopted based on team dynamics and preferences.

Getting Valuable Design Feedback.

Depending where you are in the design process, the feedback you need varies. Using a framework like 30/60/90 helps ensure you (and your designers) get quality feedback based on where they are at with the project.

Image: Overview of Design FYI, Design Jam and Design Crit with icons.

At the start of a project (30%) you are more looking for initial concept validation and blue skies — getting feedback on colours, spacing and typeface might not be super useful or relevant. Where the opposite happens towards the end of a project (90%) you want critique on the finer details like spacing inconsistencies, colour accessibility and copy refinements. Using this framework also nudges designers to ask for feedback on their designs at each of these stages; when it’s 30%, 60% and 90% done.

🕦 Time: ~30 minutes.
👩 People: At least 2 but try to keep it less than 8 per session.
📝 Template: Design Critique Template to get started →

Choosing the Right Session: Tailoring Your Collaborative Design Approach

Each of these three sessions serves a distinct purpose. When organising a session, it is crucial to identify its goals and what you aim to achieve. This will help you select the appropriate participants and allocate the right amount of time.

For instance if you:

• Are facing a creative block and seeking additional insights to find a solution, you want a Design Jam.
• Have a concept that requires feedback, a Design Critique will be the best fit.
• Have just completed a project and wish to share your learnings, host a Design FYI session.
• Are kicking off a new concept or feature and want some help getting the ideas flowing? Use a Design Jam to tap into the collective design-mind.
• Have a concept but also want fresh ideas for a specific feature/screen, consider combining a Design Critique with a Design Jam.
• Are about to show the designs to key stakeholders for review. Run it past the team during a Design Critique first.

Incorporating Collaborative Critique Sessions into your Process.

At the end of the day these collaborative sessions serve as valuable tools to tap into the creativity and knowledge of the wider design team. They should be used often, and as needed. We have an ongoing slot every 2-weeks that the team can put their hand-up to present at or use for a jam/critique. They happen outside of this time slot as needed too.

You can also organise these sessions with your research and strategy teams, developers, and core stakeholders — I always love seeing the creative ideas everyone comes up with when you give them the tools to feed into, and build on the experience.

Got questions? Let me know if the comments. I’d be happy to help.