How To Give and Get Better Design Feedback in Teams and Agencies
4 tips that can help improve your design critiques and feedback loops
Feedback is an incredibly important currency for teams in the design process. In most teams today, we have a system of design based on collaborative stakeholders including designers, developers, managers and clients, solid feedback loops, or rather their effectiveness, contributes majorly to successful design.
Designers fall on both sides of the feedback divide — they need to know to how to give feedback constructively, as well as know how to ask for feedback from colleagues, that moves their work forward along in the right direction.
The same is true when asking for feedback from clients in an agency setting and working on design approvals for projects like website reviews. Ask any team in a creative agency, and they will tell you that managing client expectations and objectives is a fine balancing act. There are challenges in ensuring that raw feedback from clients, who may have a different understanding of functionality and way of explaining concepts, can be harnessed positively.
So, here are 4 things that a team should keep in mind with respect to giving feedback and getting feedback, that can create the best possible scenario for the design process to succeed — whether in an in-house team or at a design agency.
Identify goals
Feedback can be at its most frustrating when it is not purposeful, and/or ambiguous. There’s the often talked about problem of just saying, “this doesn’t look good”, but that is not the only problem.
Whatever design your team is working, it has a goal. Whether you are creating a product to make collaboration simpler, or building a page to drive sales for a customer. There is always an aim to design. The same should be true for your design reviews, and reflected in giving feedback.
Consider these questions:
“Will this checkout flow reduce cart abandonment?”
“How can this landing page increase customer traction?”
“How do we fix the onboarding for collaborators in our app?”
All these are questions that will drive feedback towards a goal. For designers, they need to know the kind of questions to ask for feedback from colleagues. This will setup the feedback loop in the right direction.
With clients, goals are already established when design teams start working on the project, but communicating the finer goals of individual design elements, like a certain page, or an app interaction, that is where design teams have to make things clear.
However, in no way do I suggest that the onus lies simply with the designers. Sharing goal oriented feedback is something non-designers need to be aware of as well. Whether that’s a developer, manager, or client. For non-designers to learn the art of how to give good feedback is incredibly beneficial, for not just the designers on the receiving end of the feedback, but for the project as a whole.
Feedback loops that are goal-oriented are more robust, and faster.
Embrace quick and early feedback
Don’t you just hate it when teams reach the stage of high fidelity mocks or a functioning prototype, only to be told it’s going in the right direction?
Making sure feedback comes at the right time(a.k.a. as early as possible) is the solution. Quick and early feedback is the juice that successful design teams function on.
Course correction in a design process in the beginning is much easier than later on. Which is why low fidelity mocks and wireframes should be shared with your team and clients in design critiques and reviews as often as possible, so that other stakeholders can share their feedback.
And not only in meetings. Tools like Balsamiq can be used to get feedback on wireframes and mocks. Design feedback tools like zipBoard can be used to share and get reviews on website mockups, HTML prototypes, and actual websites.
Keep design meetings for relevant stakeholders
It’s funny how meetings can get so much done, and yet be the source for drops in productivity across teams. Largely, this happens because people who cannot always contribute are called into meetings as well.
If your design review is done as a meeting, then it should only involve active participants. In an in-house team, so much of design critiques can be done offline. If you’re using the right tools to support your efforts, then you can mark up issues beforehand and come into the meeting just to brainstorm alternative approaches, or why a certain design won’t work, or the vision that next iterations of the design should adhere to.
In teams where designers and developers are working closely together, right from the off, a lot of design review meetings from the engineering side can be reduced to over-the-shoulder sessions of exchanging feedback.
For the agency setting, having a single point of contact from the client side as well as the agency side can go a long way in cutting down the noise in meetings to just a genuine feedback-and-solution environment.
Apart from these, smaller things like organizing design assets in one place for quick hand-off and a version control design system to review previous changes are also helpful in keeping meetings a source of productivity.
Prioritize feedback
With so much feedback coming in from every direction, being able to prioritize is a good tool to have in your arsenal.
A lot of this will also be driven by the goals of the project defined early on, but end user feedback and their needs will also drive prioritization as the project goes on. In case of agencies, when asking for feedback from clients, that will become the focal point in prioritization.
Example: Crazy Egg’s priority matrix
Needless to say, user feedback loops are an important part of the over feedback cycle for your team. To manage and prioritize user feedback, the UX team at Crazy Egg has a neat 3-step process.
- What are the user’s biggest pain points?
- How willing are they to pay for the features that solve them?
- Create a 2x2 matrix to map out what feature/feedback should hold priority
Example: Zapier’s UX Research Database
The UX team at popular automation tool, Zapier, was also having trouble prioritizing feedback from their customers. They used to aggregate everything in Slack, but soon this spiraled out of control.
Their solution, and what could be useful for other teams as well, is building a UX database which is a central repository of the customer research, feedback and pain points.
The database has records in the form of nuggets, each of which has three components — observation (which are lessons learned), evidence (data to support observation), and meta tags (for organizing the records).
Zapier’s UX team uses Airtable to build their database, which includes other information related to each record like — user studies run, participating users, concerned Zapier employees, trends etc.
Teams and creative agencies can also use visual bug tracking tools as an alternative for a less resource intensive method of collecting and prioritizing feedback. For example, if an agency had to get a website review from a client, they could share the working URL and the clients can annotate their issues to provide feedback, which can then be prioritized and organized.
Final thoughts — Iterate on your design team & processes
Each design team and client-agency partnership will have some things that work better for them than others.
For some in-person design approval meetings will be easier to do, while for remote collaborators, design feedback tools would be the thing to go for. But with each iteration of the design loop, teams can improve their feedback process.
You can also find some very good tips on how to give and ask for better feedback. There is Gerren Lamson’s article on creating a culture of effective design critiques, which talks about specifics when exchanging feedback.
Also check out Scott Nelson’s advice on giving better design feedback by taking care of small, but important things, like being empathetic and starting with positive feedback.
One of my favorite analogies about improving design loops is based on advice from Jason Fried of Basecamp, who talks about treating teams and processes like a product. Just as we iterate to improve products, we can double down on practices that are working when sharing feedback among our own team or when asking for feedback from clients.
Learn the art of how to give good design feedback, and that will reflect in your team’s productivity and success.
Integrating your design feedback cycle into your issue and bug tracking process can help make sure that no feedback is lost or left unprocessed. Sign up to zipBoard, which can help your team organize all the design feedback into actionable tasks and simplify your feedback loops.
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