Process: Design Critique

Feedback is a critical component of the overall design process, so it warrants more than just some nice-to-follow guidelines and best practices. A polite reminder to observe the proper critique etiquette doesn’t cut it. To make the most of feedback sessions, managers and team leads need to set ground rules for design critiques.

Stakeholder-feedback sessions deserve the same rigor, consistency, and diligence as any other step in the design lifecycle. Conducting even a single design evaluation properly—with the right intentions—has the potential to propel designs from good to great. Unfortunately, design critiques often suffer from ambiguous expectations, unclear agendas, a lack of focus—or an undue fixation on peripheral issues—unbridled biases, impertinent opinions, or a cacophony of unmoderated voices. Read More

In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our expert panel discusses two topics:

• defining clear product requirements
• reviewing design solutions from different viewpoints

Our experts first discuss how to elicit clear product requirements from stakeholders. Does the right approach differ for small versus large companies? Do product requirements capture the goals of stakeholders? Do requirements reflect the true needs of users? Do they establish a good understanding of technical constraints? How can you validate the assumptions behind product requirements? What kinds of research should influence the definition of product requirements? How should you balance the needs of users versus the business?

Then, our expert panel considers some different viewpoints from which we can review design solutions: stakeholders’ business goals, the needs of users in various roles, and the feasibility or ease of implementation. On the other hand, focusing on one particular user’s needs during a design review can yield a greater number of insights. Considering different user-interface layers lets you structure your evaluation of a design solution. Plus, it’s important to consider the effectiveness of design artifacts as well. Read More

If you’ve worked in enterprise environments with a scarcity of UX resources, you already know how difficult it is to institute design processes whose goal is to improve your craft and the quality of your design deliverables. At companies that allocate insufficient funds and support to User Experience, there is often limited opportunity for activities beyond approved, budgeted project work. Moreover, building additional commitments into your schedule can be exhausting when there are already several, disparate product teams awaiting your and your teammates’ design deliverables. Activities that focus on collaboration with UX teammates and craft are usually the first to fall by the wayside.

However, making the time for UX teammates to come together and focus on our craft and the quality of our deliverables benefits not only us, but the entire company—especially the product teams with whom we work. Doing so helps prevent inconsistent designs, the use of different user interface components and patterns to accomplish essentially the same things, and, above all, the creation of poor user experiences. Furthermore, if we fail to prioritize collaborative activities that would improve the design work and deliverables of the entire UX team, we risk creating a vacuum that product teams would happily fill with their own design solutions—perhaps relying on false assumptions rather than user-centered design and often resulting in subpar user experiences. Read More