Getting Better Design Feedback
How to set up the right environment for good design feedback
This is part 1 in the installment of getting and giving design feedback. “Giving better design feedback” will follow in the next edition of the newsletter. This is your friendly reminder to subscribe, to be sure not to miss it.
Every single day, I work with designers, product and engineering partners. Every single day, I sit in countless design critiques and design reviews either with a presenting part, facilitating feedback, or as a feedback giver. What I’ve learned is that good and impactful design feedback is a result of how well you’ve set up the right environment for good design feedback to flourish, as well as how well the audience is trained to give good design feedback. As a designer, how do you actually set up your sessions in a way to receive good design feedback? Read on.
The scenario
You worked late the previous day and are excited to present your design work the following day. During your presentation, you walk people through a flow, but you get interrupted multiple times with questions or feedback. The overall review feels like you're discussing topics at a high level or going into too much detail. The session ends, and everyone leaves for their next meeting. You're left with a lot of feedback, most of which is useless, and everyone is unsure about the decisions or direction we're taking from here on out.
The result
As a result, design reviews, design critiques, or design-led presentations feel like something to avoid. These sessions often generate more work, unusable feedback, or, even worse, turn into regular design by committee – which is the worst outcome of all. It leads to compromises all around and design work that no one is really happy with.
The root cause
Often, design teams or individuals may try to avoid accountability by shifting blame and stating that "the company doesn't care about design" when critique or review sessions are ineffective. This is an easy way out and shifts responsibility away from the designer or design team to an unaccountable abstract layer. The problem is actually with the designer or design team itself.
If you ever catch yourself claiming that “the company doesn't care about design” this can mean one of two things:
There is a context gap: There is a misalignment between you and the work you are presenting, in terms of priority, with your product and engineering partners or the business as a whole.
There is a skill gap: You struggle with presenting effectively. You have difficulty setting context accurately, articulating design decisions clearly, and creating a cohesive and engaging narrative that connects the two.
By creating an effective narrative structure and routine for sharing your design work and that of your team, you can make outsized returns pretty quickly to address both context and skill gaps. Often, it's not necessary to start completely from scratch; rather, you just need to unlock existing skills or arrange them in the right order within a new structure. In any case, it does involve additional work before and after your reviews. However, it saves time in the long run by enabling faster decision-making, improving the quality of work, and increasing overall product development velocity.
4 steps to helpful and useful design feedback
Feedback is a gift, but in reality feedback is overwhelming or out of place, often it’s well intended but misdirected. Below are the 4 steps to helpful and useful design feedback. No matter what you’re working on, you want people to understand the context behind your work. Present your work in the most effective way, answer any questions and make it clear to everyone what feedback you’re looking for.
Explaining Context
Presenting Designs
Clarifying Questions
Receiving Feedback
Explaining context
To set the stage, begin by providing background information and context for the design work. Start by clearly articulating the problem you are designing against and why it matters, and how it will effectively lead to improvement. Share the design intent behind your approaches and expand on the target users and their goals. Communicate where you currently are in the design process and list any constraints that may impact the design decisions. Lastly, recap the feedback received from previous sessions to provide continuity.
When you set context rephrase the perspective in a way the company or audience cares most about: your users, your revenue, your growth, etc.. This will do one of the following:(a) get everyone on the same page and fill them in with the necessary context to give useful design feedback later in the session
or
(b) uncover a higher level misalignment and strategic problem if people disagree with initial narrative or problem.
Example: Designers set context by providing on-canvas documentation through a context card.
Skipping this step will result in missing the opportunity to uncover (b), which will lead to a variety of issues. The most common issue will be misusing detailed design work to think through product strategy. If your team is constantly churning out design work to solve product strategy issues, I’d advise to address the context gap at a higher level and with simpler deliverables, rather than solely relying on design critiques or reviews.Presenting designs
When presenting your designs, it is important to reduce the cognitive load of the audience. Take them through your thinking step by step. Whenever possible, use prototypes to demonstrate the flow and interaction of the design, rather than overwhelming the audience with individual screens and hectically scrolling the canvas. Present your two strongest design alternatives, highlighting their pros and cons. Start with the main flows and then dive into the edge cases and finer details. Use the canvas in design tools to your advantage. It can help you structure your documentation and, in turn, organize your thoughts and improve your presentation.
Example: Utilize the canvas as a framework to effectively structure and present your narrative Clarifying questions
Before opening up for feedback, ensure that everyone is on the same page by addressing any potential confusion. If someone has a question, it is likely that others may have the same question as well. When answering questions, be specific and provide a date if it relates to timelines or deadlines. Use numbers to answer questions about quantities or amounts, and provide names when addressing questions about specific individuals or teams. Remember to answer the question first and provide an explanation second.
Communication cheatsheet 
Example: Questions & answers corner on the side of the canvas for folks to add questions during the session or a-sync.
Receiving feedback
To ensure valuable feedback, it is important to control the format of the feedback. Direct the feedback process to encourage participants to write down their thoughts on canvas during the session, in a notion doc, or assign someone to take notes. This saves documentation time and ensures that feedback is captured accurately in one place. After everyone has provided their feedback, give each person an opportunity to voice their thoughts by going around the room. To ensure that you’ve understood everything, rephrase or mirror the feedback to confirm your understanding and to clarify any open points. When receiving feedback, try not to steer around it. It is often acceptable to respond with "I don’t know. I’ll need to design it and get back to you." However, make sure to address any open points down the line to establish a trustworthy design process.
Example: We’ll often create recap summaries of the feedback given and our next steps in Slack for anyone in the product team to see.
You will need strong presentation skills to make all steps work and much like improving your core design skills — you can get better at it with deliberate practice. But you need to stop treating it as something that’s unlearnable. With repetition you will get better and faster at running any review session. Being able to transform meetings that are part of the design process into polished outcomes is a high leverage skill to add to your skill stack as a designer or design manager. Tackling this moves you out of a passive position of blaming an abstract layer (“the company”), into a proactive position that improves the design feedback you and your team receive by refining the approach and skills within.
As you close both context and skill gaps, I bet you will see they do care about design.
Now that you know how to set up the right environment for good design feedback to flourish, it is important to note that this does not guarantee receiving spot-on design feedback from participants. Next time in part 2, we will explore practical methods to enhance your design feedback skills.