How To Cultivate Healthy Design Feedback

The Do’s and Don’ts of Constructive Creative Conversations

Feedback is arguably the most important resource for a designer. 

It helps skilled designers hone their work faster. It gives junior designers the opportunity to learn from more experienced team members. And, when done well, it helps everyone stay focused on goals and outcomes. 

Yet despite all this, establishing a healthy culture of feedback within a design team isn’t necessarily easy. So this post will examine informal and formal practices that can shape the way designers give and receive feedback.

Informal Feedback Is All About Environment

The key to generating good informal feedback is having a good environment, in a physical or virtual space, that encourages a bit of creative chaos and naturally affords opportunities for people to interact. In a physical space, typically this means working out in the open and not sequestering designers in offices or cubicles. In a virtual space, in the remote work culture (like we have here at InVision) this means cultivating times for spontaneous discussion and creative iteration via tools like Zoom, Slack and Freehand. 

It also means having work readily available for viewing—not hidden away on hard drives. That’s why the walls of a design studio should be sacred space for sharing, debating, revising and celebrating work. Having lots of sticky notes and markers around encourages people to contribute, even when they’ve only got a moment to spare. At InVision we use Confluence to post plans, mission, vision and rough ideas to invite collaboration from all corners of the organization.

In Principles of Product Design, I wrote about how the design team at Greater Good Studio creates a designated physical space for every new project. Over days and weeks these project spaces come alive with evolving ideas and debates.

Greater Good Studios creates a physical space for each project to create shared understanding of their work.

Just remember, the spaces in which you create should be working space, not gallery space. The fidelity of shared work will affect the feedback it receives. So consider spinning up a Freehand, printing in lower resolution before you pin up on your studio walls, or adding a few handwritten scratchy notes to a comp to let colleagues know when work is in draft form and open to feedback. 

The Do’s and Don’ts of Formal Feedback

Design teams typically practice four different types of formal feedback: design reviews, design standups, retrospectives and postmortems. Let’s quickly run through some suggestions for each.

DESIGN REVIEWS provide in-depth feedback focused on project goals.

• Do schedule these reviews early, midway and at the end of a project.
• Don’t include more than about seven people.
• Do bring in experts from other teams.
• Don’t use a design review to reveal finished work.
• Do choose a facilitator and ground rules for the conversation.
• Don’t let designers pitch ideas or explain too much.

DESIGN STANDUPS are quick check-ins to keep team members on the same page.

• Do establish a fixed time for everyone to participate in daily standups. 
• Don’t let standups turn into design critiques. 
• Do answer three questions: What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? Is anything in your way?
• Don’t sit down. Stay on your feet and keep things moving.

RETROSPECTIVES happen after a project is launched or a sprint is completed.

• Do include everyone who participated.
• Don’t skip this opportunity to integrate lessons learned. 
• Do consider using a survey before retrospectives to gather all voices.
• Don’t forget to reflect on what did and didn’t go well.

POSTMORTEMS are for when a project has gone poorly.

• Do rely on an impartial moderator for the discussion. 
• Don’t start without some ground rules. 
• Do focus on a timeline of events and facts. 
• Don’t descend into finger pointing. 
• Do send out a summary email after the postmortem
• Don’t quit the process without clarifying lessons and action steps. 

For a deeper look at all four of these feedback processes, check out Chapter 4 of the Principles of Product Design. 

A Few Thoughts on Giving Feedback

Feedback can be intimidating for both the person giving it and the person receiving it. 

Paying careful attention to the language you use in giving feedback will help keep criticisms from feeling overly personal. For example, if you think a layout misses the mark, talk about the “design” and not the person who made it. 

This is especially true in the beginning of a project or relationship, when you’re developing trust. While honesty is necessary, you may want to temper criticism and lean towards encouragement in the early going. Once you’ve established momentum and rapport you’ll be freer to express direct criticism.

Ultimately, practice is the best way for designers to get comfortable expressing and hearing differing ideas. And as a team builds experience with feedback, it will develop a framework and language for thinking and talking about design more clearly. This will level up individual skills and raise the performance level of the entire team.

If you’re interested in reading more on this topic, here are two good articles from the Inside Design blog: 

• How to Give Designers Feedback They Can Actually Use
• How to Give Designers Better Feedback