Conducting Effective Design Critiques

Conducting a Design Walkthrough

“One way to critique a product or service is to do a design walkthrough with stakeholders,” answer Dan and Jo. “Before doing a design walkthrough, it’s important to plan the session carefully and determine exactly what you want its outcome to be and what you would like to learn.

“Problems arise during design walkthroughs when there is no facilitator, so either assume that role yourself or assign the role to someone else. As a facilitator, if you do not frame a design review or design walkthrough properly, it can quickly turn into a free-for-all. You should decide, for example, whether a design review should focus only on a product’s visual design rather than its interactive elements or perhaps focus on the reasoning behind the design.

“Here are some tips for effectively planning a design walkthrough:

• Set an agenda.
• Define the walkthrough’s scope.
• Define the walkthrough’s objectives.
• Create an appropriate environment for the review.
• Schedule the session for the right time of day.
• Determine the session’s duration.
• Define the session’s ground rules.
• Define your design goals.
• Create reusable tools.
• Define your outcomes.
• Define your next steps.”

For more information about doing design walkthroughs, read Dan’s UXmatters article, “Walking Through Your Product Design With Stakeholders.”

Benefits and Challenges of Design Critiques

“There is nothing as important than having additional sets of eyes look at what you’re designing,” exclaims Tobias. “Design critiques are not the only way to make that happen, but they’re a very good way of doing that. Although design reviews can be painful, you should enforce the same rule that guides brainstorming: anyone can bring up anything, and there are no wrong statements. You may not agree, but everything is a valid opinion. On a design team, everybody should submit their designs for critique. It’s important for everyone to experience the feeling of their design being put under an electron microscope. Experiencing this yourself helps you to provide better and more nuanced feedback when you review somebody else’s design.

“It’s not about pride—it’s about understanding what others consider good or worth improving. It may sound easy, but it is painful. If you’re a good designer, you care. You already care when at the idea stage or when you’ve just created rough sketches. But think of the tradeoff: you’ll feel pain during the critique, but what you get from the experience is evidence about whether you’re on the right track—and maybe even some helpful direction.

“I think the greatest challenge is to run a critique on a complex system,” continues Tobias. “Designers can require quite some time to explain what they’re showing. This may include introducing special vocabulary or explaining business logic. All of this can easily turn into a lengthy monologue from a designer—and the other folks still might not understand everything. In such situations, it can be helpful to distill the core of your design. One way to do that is by taking the paradigm that governs your user interface design approach and basically transplanting it into an easier to understand context.

“For example, I was working on a large application user interface for the energy sector, and the challenge at hand was allowing users to filter lists using nested Boolean operators. When I asked other designers to review my work, rather than showing the whole product in which this filter feature was embedded, I isolated the list and the operators from the rest of the product. I turned the list—which in the real product included energy-specific items—into a list with items such countries, states, cities—things everybody understands. Then I asked them to envision how the filtering worked using this list. It worked fine. However, it’s important always to remember that, by taking a core paradigm out of a real product context, you do run the risk of not getting feedback that is applicable to the real product. It’s talking about the how rather than the why—and the why is critically important. But, if that’s your objective, a design review or usability test with actual target users would be better.”

Merging Collaboration and Critique

“I don’t think critique sessions are necessarily part of a well-run project,” challenges Jordan. “When working on a product team, UX professionals need to proactively integrate their expertise throughout the entire project. This means figuring out ways of improving collaboration. That said, one really cool way of merging collaboration and critique is through a technique I call the feedback wall, where designers post concepts, sketches, and workflows on a wall—ideally a whiteboard wall—and encourage other team members to walk by and add comments on Post-it notes throughout the day. Then, the next day, the team regroups and reviews and expands on all of the comments.”

Improving Your Critique Technique

Some advice that Dana posted on critiquing moderator practices also applies to improving a design critique process: “One of the most effective techniques I’ve found is to give folks a simple checklist of a few things—ask open-ended questions; give neutral acknowledgements; don’t offer anything; ask about past experience versus future intentions—then ask them to watch or listen to recordings of themselves. Alone.

“I then ask them to tell me what they think they could do better on, what they think they need help and practice on, and what they have questions about. We talk about what they might have learned if they had asked some questions in a different way. When most people do this, they get it and correct their approach pretty quickly.”