Redesigning Our Design Feedback Sessions. Based On Feedback
Why (and how) we provide design feedback at SEEK
This piece was co-written with my colleague Daniel Jimenez Nassar
As a growing design organisation, we frequently review the ways we work together to ensure that our rituals are aligned to the needs of our evolving team and practice.
During a recent review, feedback from the team highlighted that we could make some changes to the framework for our design pinup sessions in order to make the sessions more meaningful and worthwhile.
What are pinups?
Pinups are nothing new and pretty common among design teams. You might see them otherwise referred to as “critique” or “design sparring” sessions. We prefer “pinups” as it feels a bit safer and less combative. We’d been running weekly pinups for a number of years without much change so it was good to spend some time looking at what was and wasn’t working well and make some adjustments.
Pinups at SEEK involve a group of designers coming together to share their work in order to receive helpful and constructive feedback. The goal is to make the designs better, ensure consistency across different products, and share knowledge and viewpoints in order to move the work forward.
We deliberately keep the size of our pinup groups small as we find that provides everyone a chance to present their work frequently, and so that we can keep the conversation focused.
We want to ensure that this forum is seen as a safe space where designers can feel supported and gain confidence in the best ways to progress their work.
What was lacking?
When the team got together to review our ways of working, a number of needs and areas for improvement surfaced. These included: getting timely design feedback, learning from each other, understanding what other parts of the company are doing, and having better cross department collaboration. It was interesting that those themes arose, as they cover many of the reasons why we have design pinups. So we investigated further and started to implement some changes to our pinup framework.
What were the issues? What did we change?
Issue: As a 2-sided marketplace, splitting our pinup groups down those sides (employers and job seekers) limited visibility of the impact designs might have on the opposite side of the marketplace.
Change: We created groups that mixed designers from both sides of the marketplace. Designers who worked on the job search experience for job seekers were mixed with those who focused on the job posting experience for employers.
Issue: Design feedback often lacked focus, or focused on the wrong elements of the design.
Change: We created a more structured framework for presenting work and giving feedback. We allocated roles (presenter, facilitator, audience) with specific responsibilities during the session.
Issue: Conversation tended to drift to less relevant topics.
Change: We made design feedback the primary reason for getting together. Any other type of content would only be discussed if time permitted.
Creating new groups
We used to have one pinup for designers who were focused on solving problems for job seekers, and another for those working on employer products. We decide to create groups that mixed designers from both sides of the marketplace. Designers who worked on the job search experience for job seekers were mixed with those who focused on the job posting experience for employers.
The result of this simple change has been profound. We are now seeing much better awareness and collaboration across both sides of the marketplace which is resulting in better experiences for our customers.
Structuring the sessions
As already mentioned, one of the areas of feedback about pinups was that design feedback often lacked focus, or focused on the wrong elements of the design. In order to address this, we implemented a more structured format for presenting work and giving feedback. The person presenting their work frames the conversation by addressing 5 key questions:
- What are you working on?
- What’s the business & user/customer need?
- What’s the goal of your design?
- What specifically are you seeking feedback on?
- What stage is the design at (we use the 30/60/90 format).
These questions help the designer who is presenting their work to set the scene for others in order to receive more meaningful feedback and progress the areas of the design that most need to evolve.
We created a template that helps the designer tell the story by answering the 5 key questions above in order to receive more meaningful feedback.
This has probably been the most important change.
It took a little while for people to adjust to the new structure but now that everyone is used to it we’re finding that conversation is more focused and the people presenting their work are receiving much better feedback.
The 3 roles in SEEK pinups
We were inspired to define the 3 roles of pinups by this poster created by Jim Jones while working at Opower.
Facilitator
One of the challenges when entering a design conversation is to keep focus and keep time under control. It seems we love to chat, and we love to go deep on curly issues. Given the nature of the challenges we commonly discuss it’s easy for conversation to drift into interesting (but less relevant) areas. To address this, we focused on providing clarity about the different roles in pinup and created a dedicated facilitator role. The facilitator:
- keeps the conversation focused
- ensures we stick to the allotted time
- captures notes about the feedback that is being given
- promotes equal participation and ensures that everyone gets a chance to be heard.
Having the facilitator capture notes has proven to be really valuable. It allows the presenter to really focus on the conversation and the feedback that is being given without having to capture it themselves. We share the feedback in a Slack channel so that it can be referred to in future pinups as the designs evolve.
Presenter
The presenter’s role is to provide clear context about the work they are presenting and the feedback that they are seeking. The presenter:
- Adds themselves to the pinup agenda (an active post on Slack) during the week leading up to the pinup. We’ve found that 20–30 minutes per presenter is about the right amount of time
- Prepares their response to the 5 key questions (context, need, goal, feedback required, stage of design)
- commits to loop back to the group as the design evolves.
Audience
The role of the audience is to listen to and understand the context given by the presenter, ask clarifying questions, and provide constructive feedback to the presenter in line with what they have requested (i.e. no discussion of button colours if the presenter is interested in feedback about the page flow or form labels).
How are these sessions going & where to next?
We’ve been running these revised pinup sessions for about 6 months now and we’re really happy with how they’ve been going. Team members seem more engaged, people are presenting their work more frequently and, most importantly, people are getting insightful feedback about their designs that they are able to use to make their work better.
However we never sit still so we are planning ongoing reviews to continue our commitment to continuous improvement of our design practice at SEEK.
What does your team do for design feedback? We’d love to hear from you if there are any interesting and effective things that work for you.
COVID-19 update
We’ve made some adjustments to help these sessions run smoothly in a world where all participants are working from home.
Presenters now share their designs in the pinup Slack channel ahead of time so everyone has an opportunity to prepare and understand what we’re going to be giving feedback on.
Presenters are also encouraged to do a little more preparation in structuring their presentation so there’s less jumping around inside Sketch files or similar. This makes it easier for people follow at home.
