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Guidelines for constructive and empowering design feedback and critique
Regular, well-run feedback and critique sessions are critical for helping to refine a product and make it great, and a lot of these sessions do not help accomplish those goals.
Doing critique and feedback sessions in a way that is constructive and empowering, without hurting feelings and trust takes practice and patience.
My team does a daily demo and critique. We have found that the more often you provide feedback, the more it feels like coaching and the less it feels like criticism. Critique should be empowering and in service of making better products.
Frequent feedback also prevents people from going too far off course. Once people get really far off course, the critique and feedback become a lot more painful.
People will also often feel like because they have worked so hard and spent so much time on something that they want to go forward with it. They have become incredibly invested in it. Feedback after someone has become invested in something is usually too late, leads to hurt feelings and often puts you in the position of remediation, instead of driving alignment around the highest quality product and design possible.
I consider feedback and critique critical to building thoughtful and useful products. I’ve put together a list of guidelines that everyone doing product design critique should understand (and these can be adapted for other areas of design).
I put together this list of core guidelines for critique and feedback that will help you run and participate in better feedback and critique sessions
Here are my core guidelines for anyone providing feedback and critique:
Trust comes first
People do not like receiving feedback from people they don’t trust. There are probably some good evolutionary reasons for this. Trust must be established before feedback and criticism can work well.
With a lack of trust, people become defensive fast. With a lack of trust, people also will get very personal, very fast.
Do not invite anyone to a feedback and critique session who the rest of the team doesn’t trust. Do not invite anyone to receive feedback and…
