Getting Feedback From the Design Team

Hey there, my name is Eugene Arkhipov. I’m a designer with over 12 years of experience, 6 of which are as a product designer. Today I’d like to talk about a practice that helps designers design better solutions, work faster, share knowledge between colleagues, and team up the team. That’s Design Crit sessions — an informal, quick, and simple way of getting feedback from your colleagues.

Why Feeback Is Important

First of all, feedback helps make your designs better. Folks from other teams can see a project from a different angle, give advice and help understand your solution’s strong and weak sides.

Discussing projects improves communication inside a team and makes it more transparent. People will better understand what other designers are working on, which challenges they get, and why certain decisions were made.

Designers from other departments can see how your project corresponds with other parts of the product and can make your vision wider. This input will make the product more consistent.

Sharing and getting feedback is an essential skill for designers that can help them communicate with other designers, stakeholders, clients, and others. It will help to understand your interlocutors better, argue your vision and defend your solutions.

When It Can Be the Most Helpful

I’d say there is no rule or any typical practice. Feel free to ask your colleagues for feedback if you feel it will be helpful.

In the early stages of a project, talking to peers who worked on this part of the product can be helpful. This feedback will let you better understand the problem, learn existing functionality and know the limitations. Also, you can share your understanding of the problem, ideas, and possible solutions.

Discussing mockups at later stages will give you feedback on the visuals and ensure that you stick to all the recommendations and patterns the design team agreed on.

Live vs Asynchronous Design Crit Sessions

You can discuss designs with your colleagues live or asynchronously. The key is to describe the project and its goals, share your vision and solutions, and tell what designers should comment on.

Start live sessions with the task description and share the context or current solution. Ensure everything is clear and guys don’t have any questions. After that, you can share designs and ask questions.

Figma or Figjam works great for asynchronous sessions. You can describe the context directly in the file and run the conversation in the comments.

Advise: remove everything distracting or confusing your colleagues from the page. Help them focus on your questions and essential stuff. Using Loom or Slack video records can help you better provide the context.

In the early stages of a project, getting feedback live is better because your colleagues and you can have multiple questions that can help everybody understand the project deeper. Asynchronous sessions work great for getting feedback on visual styling.

Collecting Feedback

First of all, you should gather feedback. Pick any option that works for you: taking notes in Notion or on paper, recording conversations, or commenting in Figma.

Don’t hesitate to ask “why” if your colleague’s comment is unclear. Asking additional questions is okay. Let your colleagues explain their feedback. Sometimes it can be more helpful than the initial comment.

Quite often, it’s hard for designers to focus on the topic of a discussion, and they start discussing other parts of the designs or other issues. Try to avoid this and keep the team’s focus on the topic of your request.

Be thankful for the feedback, and don’t take it on yourself. Colleagues discuss the designs, not the designers.

Bonus: Sharing Feedback

The feedback should be objective and extended. Comments like “I don’t like the gray button color. It won’t work” aren’t good. Instead, you should say that “the gray button color makes them less prominent, which can decrease the conversion.”

Stay focused and comment on the topic of a discussion. Discussing unrelated stuff can take a lot of time and ruin the purpose of the meeting.

Avoid giving concrete action items. The main goal of the discussion is to help the designer understand the problem, share knowledge, and outline potential issues. As a result, the designer should get food for thought that will come up to develop a better solution.

Don’t forget to highlight good design decisions because it will let designers understand in which direction to move. Positive comments during Design Crit sessions improve the relationships inside the design team and increase involvement.