Silent design critiques: making your design team more effective
Use this step-by-step process for combining Figma, Zoom and Google Sheets to streamline design decisions
Imagine the following scenario: You’ve prepared some designs and deliberated over details for days. You want some feedback and ideas on what direction to take. You manage to schedule some time in teammate’s calendars and book a room for next week. The day comes and the floor is yours. Then Karl the PM sees the designs and launches a monologue about your product strategy. You don’t have a new direction. You have a headache. You also have a bunch of teammates sat wondering why the hell they got pulled into this meeting.
Sound familiar?
Design critiques are a part of everyday life for many Product Designers. The quality and timing of a good critique can be a catalyst for new ideas and solving old problems. However, many leave them with more questions than answers. It’s not that people want to cause problems. They just aren’t taught how to help you.
This article can help you get the best from your teammates in the next critique you facilitate.
Critique format
Before you can plan your critique, it’s best to start with deciding upon the format. Given the world’s shift to working online, remote design critiques might be a good place to start.
The benefits of a remote critique are:
- You aren’t dependant on securing expensive meeting spaces
- You can solicit feedback from talented people anywhere in the world
If structured well, a remote critique can also reduce bias, organize feedback, and can be extended to be asynchronous. If you decide to have a silent critique in which feedback is captured without discussion, this can help focus attention.
If you‘re in need of different feedback, look to Figma for inspiration. An overview of their critique process can be seen in their toolbelt below:
However, if it feels like the right time for a silent critique, follow the six steps below to help you get the best results.
Process
Step #1: Determine what you need to critique
At each stage of the product design process, you’ll need different feedback to make effective decisions. The artefacts you show during a critique should reflect this. Don’t show hi-fi screens if you want to gain feedback on an initial user journey. Don’t show wireframes when discovery research could articulate the problem you’re trying to solve better.
Step #2: Determine who needs to attend
Think about who can offer the most value to the design process at the stage it’s at. While this could be a director or CEO, in the early stages it’s more likely to be developers, fellow designers, product managers, and those working with users. Be intentional in whose time you ask for.
Step #3: Set clear expectations
Regardless of what feedback you’re looking for in a design critique, you need to set clear expectations. Do this by including five things when introducing a crit session:
Project background: Provide a brief reminder of the business and customer goals that conceived this project.
What feedback you’re looking for: If you’re exploring user journeys, make it clear that you want feedback on how content and features are explored from screen to screen.
What you’re not looking for feedback on: Make it clear what isn’t useful at this point. For exploring user journeys with wireframes, supporting copy might exist to provide an idea of the content but the details of which don’t need scrutinizing right now.
Things to remember: Ask people to be honest and open, and prioritize suggestions and questions. This encourages constructive thinking that leads to better products. For more ideas on how to frame critique etiquette, read GV’s guide to Design Critiques by Braden Kowitz.
Clear instruction: Ask people to provide thoughts, questions, concerns, and suggestions as Figma comments. This enables you to document feedback from each owner so you can follow up later.
Step #4: Time to critique
Ask your teammates if they have any questions that need to be answered in order to contribute useful feedback. When somebody asks something directly related to the product or design, say “That’s a great question! Can you put it in as a comment so that I have it on record?”. Tell people how long they have to leave comments and set a timer. If you’re feeling fancy, you can even use a Figma Timer plugin.
At the end of your session, you should end up with a wealth of comments. The outcome of this process helped me in a recent critique which can be seen below (content blurred of course). The instructions for the session are listed in the top left. Three different ideas for a UX flow were critiqued on the right.
Step #5: Conclude the session
Conclude the session by addressing specific comments. This does three things:
- Address key concerns while you have everyone’s attention
- Answer questions and tell the owners you’ll come back to them later if need be.
- Call out great suggestions and questions that will help you improve the design
In doing these, you emphasize your teammate's time is well spent. This is crucial if you want people to participate in a critique again!
Step #6: Collate feedback
Following your session, collate comments in a Google Sheet. List each comment, its owner, and the screen or section it relates to. To the right of this, list your next steps. Examples of next steps include following up with a stakeholder or exploring alternative UI treatments. You can refer to this list when referencing design decisions in the project documentation.
Optional step: Extend the critique
If you want more feedback, post a link to the Figma board in a relevant Slack channel with an open call for feedback. Alternatively, send a link to anybody else as you see fit. Tell them that there’s instruction on what’s expected in the Figma file and if they’ve got any questions they can just ask. Set a deadline for when feedback will be closed.
This allows you to collect feedback asynchronously without using your time. Be aware that this can increase the chance of biased comments as it will allow people time to read any existing comments.
Outcomes
Even with a perfect structure, a single critique isn’t a silver bullet. Yet a sequence of them can help you design better products and bring your team along in the process. People leave each session feeling they were able to contribute to the project effectively and you establish clear next steps. With a remote critique, you can achieve this from anywhere, and more importantly anyone in the world.
Next steps
Given the current climate and the requirement to work from home as a result, why not take this as an opportunity to improve your remote processes?
If you want to build a habit of facilitating better critiques, learn how to set OKRs as a Product Designer and make it your goal next month. You could take it a step further and coach your team on how to do the same!
Other articles on critiques
- Tanner Christensen gives us a peek into how design critiques are conducted at Facebook.
- Noah Levin gives us a detailed look into how different critique formats are used in the Figma design team.
