How to present to get the feedback you want
Getting feedback can be challenging, especially for fresh designers. It can be hard to think through the consequences of implementing the feedback on the spot, and we can feel obligated to implement feedback from seniors and above. To get myself comfortable with such situations, I read through some Medium articles (linked at the end of the post) and discussed my findings with my mentor to help me during our weekly one-on-ones. I have come up with some tips that helped me present in front of people, and I’m sharing them to help you as well.
Feedback is important for designers because we need to be open to hearing everybody’s voice and catch flaws before shipping a product. The ability to present is equally important — due to the fact that we make such professional work, we don’t want to lose credibility due to getting our tongues tied when responding to feedback or answering clarifying questions on the spot.
1, Explain your problems and intent
No one else in the room knows more about your work than you, including your manager, peers, and directors because you are the creator of that piece. When you present your work, people are trying to understand where you are coming from and why you made some design decisions. As junior designers, we tend to only explain how to get to “this” page and what happens if users click “that” button; we are helping our audiences navigate through our designs. Knowing the previous and next step in the flow is helpful, but it is not enough to understand your design decision.
My mentor, Jessi, once gave me a tip after noticing that I seemed anxious when I tried to get feedback from Engineers. After I explained my concerns, she recommended that I start sharing my design work by answering two questions:
What is the problem I am trying to solve?
What is my intent to solve the problem in the design?
This will help bring people to the same level of understanding as you because the problem will have been brought to their attention. When you only present a solution, no matter how good your solution is, your audience’s interpretation of the problem can be different from your own. Explaining your intent can give people a quick braindump of what directions you have tried. Knowing what you have thought through can help them filter out repeated ideas and give you fresh ones.
2, Know what feedback you want
There are many different types of feedback. Sometimes you don’t know what to do next so you want a direction with which to move forward. Sometimes you have a solid design but you want an extra pair of eyes to catch missing points. Sometimes you don’t feel right about a design decision and you just want to talk about it.
During a critique or collaboration with your team, we tend to just welcome any kind of feedback, which is very open and you can get a lot of information. However, the feedback is not always helpful for you. For instance, if you are already stuck on something and the feedback you receive is about a point you have missed, you can feel more lost at the end of the session, but your issues are still not solved and you get more questions to think through.
What’s your goal and scope?
Before you go to a feedback session, ask yourself: what is your goal? What are you trying to achieve? Share it with your team when you present, so that everyone knows the direction to help you.
What is your scope? How much work needs to be done before the deadline? Be communicative with your team so everyone knows what step you’re heading into so they can offer proper support. Achieve what you can within your scope.
3, Ask until you truly understand the feedback
When two people have a conversation, they are both building a mental model in their heads to help them understand. Our language can help us create an outline of the content we are talking about, and our brains will fill in the blanks. Our interpretation can cause us to talk about different things, meanwhile, we think we are talking about the same thing as it falls under the same outline.
One day, I was talking about the design of showing results with an engineer. However, we grew more and more confused about the conversation until another designer, who had been listening to us this whole time, pointed out that I was talking about showing the users’ preview result before a user takes an action, and he was talking about showing users’ report result after the action had been taken. It is the same piece of information we have been talking about, but the use case of the information we are thinking about is very different. In my mind, I was hoping the information could help users make a decision but in his head, he was hoping to let users reflect on what they had decided. Our trains of thought started in the same station but ended up going in very different directions. There are ways to engage in a conversation when this situation happens; for example, you can reiterate what you heard to let the other side tell you if it is what they expressed. One trick that works for me is:
Use your personas to make a scenario of how the user would use a product. Provide your understanding of the feedback using a new user journey in order to validate with your audience that you understand their thoughts.
Stories, for designers, provide a journey to help reset some of our assumptions. They offer a platform for you and your conversational partner to work with and give you users and flows to think through instead of listening to a piece of feedback just based off of a suggestion.
4, Don’t be defensive, but validate
Often when you receive feedback, you might hear debatable ideas. By debatable, I mean some feedback that doesn’t align with your vision. For example, an icon is not clear or a piece of UX copy is confusing to some people but not to others. When you encounter a situation like this, don’t be defensive or too open because you and your peers are not the users of your product. As designers, we are supposed to be the representation of our users’ voices.
When there’s conflict on opinions. Rather than fight for which one you think is better, we should be open to listening to the feedback and validate with users.
Use your research resource to test out different versions. If you have limited resources and scope, you can also guerrilla test with someone who has never worked on your product to get a sense of what works better. No matter what, don’t be defensive when you receive feedback that doesn’t align with your vision.
Being open allows you to ask questions and look at the project objectively.
5, Redirect bad feedback to get good feedback
“I am not a big fan of models”
“I don’t like this color
“Can you just add a button here?”
You will inevitably get bad feedback that can be personal, subjective, and direct to solutions. People don’t always know how to give constructive feedback. It is frustrating to hear bad feedback, but instead of panic or ignore the suggestion, you can help them come up with good feedback.
Sometimes, your teammates just express their concerns, but they are not sure how to share it with you. For example, an engineer tells you he/she doesn’t like side panels. It may sound like a very subjective feeling, but if you ask more about why they don’t like it and what’s not working for them, then you will find out more things that you as a designer might never think about. For the side panel example, it could be that side panels mess up the scrolling on your page, or the platform your product lives on works better with models than side panels. When you hear bad feedback, don’t get frustrated. Instead, try to ask questions to understand the thoughts behind them.
Ask for your audience’s concerns that you don’t see.
When your audience gives subjective feedback or immediately offers solutions, ask what the problem is that they notice — if they respond with “that’s just my personal feeling,” then the struggle to understand the feedback isn’t worth the time and effort and you should move on with your life.
As I mentioned before, I’m still working to improve my skills in getting feedback. Some of what I’ve said are things I am actively practicing; when I grow more comfortable, though, I may have a different opinion. What do you think of my recommendations? Leave a comment so we can learn from you too!
Feedback is a gift. — Jim Trinka and Les Wallace
References:
http://www.dubberly.com/articles/conversational-alignment.html
