How to fight the fear of sharing your work

It’s time to celebrate shitty first drafts.

Visibility and access to work in progress is a major struggle for design teams, because it requires a level of sharing that some designers aren’t comfortable with. They’d rather fight through fifty iterations alone than share before they’re ready. And if at that point you decide the design doesn’t align with the project goals, your brand, or simply doesn’t work — it’s hard to figure out where things broke down and how to help them move forward.

But it’s a scary thing to share raw, unstructured work. It can leave people feeling exposed and vulnerable. Not to mention criticism of incomplete work is tough to swallow. But the only way designers will grow and produce the best work is to share work as early as possible. It’s like asking for directions — the earlier you ask, the less you stray from the most direct course to your destination.

Here are 3 ways you can fight the fear of sharing among your design team:

Foster an environment that rewards shitty first drafts.

In her book, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott dedicates an entire chapter to “Shitty First Drafts.” It’s focused on the writing process, but the sentiment can be applied to designers as well.

“… Shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. People tend to look at successful writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated…”

Creatives don’t just pump out stellar work on the first try. The real beauty of being a talented designer is having the ability to evolve your ideas. Communicate this to your team and let them know that the only way they’ll get better is to put themselves out there. One way of adding some encouragement is to create a culture where you celebrate sharing. No matter the quality or stage, reward designers who share and elicit feedback with each iteration. To shake things up, you could even give an award to the worst first draft to keep “shitty first drafts” top of mind and part of the culture.

Provide a framework for presentation and feedback.

Critiques can get ugly when feedback consists of unstructured and unfiltered thoughts. With each session, guide the discussion by setting frameworks for how people should present their designs and give feedback to fellow designers. If you’re consistent with this framework in a group setting, it becomes easier for designers to set the same expectation when sharing work sporadically. Before a critique, provide your team with these three rules when giving feedback:

• Focus on the goal: When sharing work or feedback, focus on the end-goal. It’s not enough to say you don’t like something. Think about what the purpose is of the design and what it needs to communicate.
• Follow up with questions: If you are having a hard time understanding, don’t jump to conclusions. Ask questions to get more context.
• Frame the feedback: When you’re clear on the goal and where your fellow designer is coming from, frame your feedback in a way that opens a discussion. Instead of trying to suggest a solution, open it up as a problem to solve together.

It’s likely your team won’t get it on the first, second or even third go-round. But it’s important that you communicate this in a group setting so that everyone feels comfortable holding each other accountable. Behaviors aren’t changed overnight, but these frameworks will make it much easier.

Make sharing frictionless.

Fear isn’t the only thing that keeps designers from sharing their work. It can be a real pain to upload every iteration of a design, and most tools don’t make it very easy to do so. Your team needs a simple way of sharing work with one another that doesn’t require adding more steps in their process. Of course, Wake is the best way to do this, but if you find another way that makes this easy — by all means, go for it!

No matter how they share their work, whether online or in person, designers need to practice articulating their decisions. Being a talented designer is one thing, but having the ability to communicate the goals brings people to a whole new level. It can be challenging at first. But when you crack open the process and focus on that open dialogue, everyone is more aligned and more aware of how they can improve.

Wake is a design collaboration app built exclusively for teams. It was designed to fit seamlessly into a designer’s workflow to encourage fast and frequent sharing throughout the entire design process. Sign up today!