How to run a design critique feedback session
No designer loves critique. It’s like showing a picture of your child and having the viewer respond with “Well…it’s a good start…”.
Design critique is not a personal attack. It’s commentary and feedback on your work, and even the most senior designers get feedback on their work that they implement in order to improve their designs. It feels intimidating because it’s an open meeting for people to voice their thoughts, and often those thoughts can feel negative because it means your work doesn’t feel “finished”. Simply put, you cannot design in a vacuum. Designers cannot create in a vacuum so understand that the thoughts, comments, suggestions, questions, and even pushback you might receive will all make your work much better.
When showcasing your designs, it’s extremely important to tell a full story, by remembering your audience. Some suggestions:
Consider who you’re speaking to.
Who are the folks in the room that are listening?
Who are the most important stakeholders?
What is the audience’s familiarity with the product or service? (For example, are you presenting to engineers who see the product often, or are you presenting to the C-suite executives who aren’t as familiar?).
Contextualize the problem well. Don’t jump straight into the granular work that you’ve done but rather give context as to how your work fits into the larger jigsaw puzzle.
Put together a short Power Point to encapsulate all of your ideas. (It could be any presentation tool). While you can always pull up screens within Figma or Sketch, sometimes it helps to tell a more polished story with the help of slides. You can show the before & after, any data you’ve collected, tell a story of your users, and really organize your thoughts in a format that’s familiar and accessible to your audiences.
Don’t forget to practice! Run through your slides, your Sketch files, your prototype. Make sure you don’t have any spelling errors, or any evident mistakes. Speak out loud so that you get used to hearing how you will sound, and this will ease your nerves when you have to present to a room full of people.
Explain the jargon. In line with the point about remembering who your audience is (#1), look at your presentation to see if you have any confusing jargon that you need to give clarification to.
Set the agenda and stay on track. Sometimes stakeholders get extremely excited, or curious, or chatty, and can go off-track. It’s your job to lead the meeting by pausing for questions, jotting down any deliverables, and bringing the conversation back to relevant, achievable design that fits the current goals. A classic go-to explainer for ideas that you cannot implement (or maybe don’t want to) is - “Hm, that sounds interesting. We might explore that idea in the future, but these are the features we are focusing on for this iteration. Do you have any thoughts or suggestions for these changes specifically?”
Take notes on the feedback, but understand that you need to be strategic with the suggestions you implement. Some stakeholders’ voices will be much more relevant, but it’s still important to be considerate and inviting of all feedback. Write the ideas down, explore the most interesting and meaningful ones, and keep on inviting ideas from all the stakeholders.
If you have pushback on the feedback (meaning you do not agree), think about :
“Is this the hill that I wish to die on?”. Unfortunately, many of your ideas might die right there in the water. Consider which ideas you
Falling back on research. A terrific time to pull out research is when you have skeptical voices is now. People can argue about aesthetics, but you can’t argue with statistics, numbers, data. (I mean, yes, you technically can, but let’s not talk about that right now).
Should you get discouraged if you’re getting too much feedback encouraging you to change your work? Absolutely not. It’s a part of growing as a designer, but also “pushing the needle”. I remember once I told my manager, “Bob, should we really show the business folks this feature? You know they’re going to shoot it down and tell us we can’t design it.” He responded, “Khrys, we never start off at 70%. We always start off at 100%. If they negotiate down, we are scaling down from the full 100% of our ideas, not 70%.” Keep trying, keep creating fantastic work, and know that more often than not, you have great opportunity to bring your ideas to life.
Some last words of advice:
Wrap up the meeting by running down the list of deliverables, and ask about any timelines & expectations.
Send out minutes if you recorded any as notes. Having a written record of these items will really help you set the expectations from all of the stakeholders, and push your projects forward. This also helps with buy-in from everyone and help you push your work forward, since often so much of design day-to-day is convincing people to be excited about executing your ideas.