Building a World-Class Design Critique Practice

So why is it important to build a world class design critique practice? Why is it important? How are you advancing your weekly ideas, your concepts and your designs, your experiences so that you can advance them on a weekly basis in a consistent and non stressful way? Well, you got to build a really solid design critique practice and today I'm going to give you a world class breakdown masterclass on exactly how to do that. And I'm going to break down four keys areas that you can focus on when you go in to building your next design critique practice. And what does this mean? It means it's like how are you going to be showing up? How are you going to be interacting with your team? How are you going to be setting up and preparing for those moments? What are the outcome, the desired outcomes that you're really trying to focus for and really trying to get out of these sessions? What does success even look like? And what are the topics you're bringing to these design critiques? And how are you keeping the team stay laser focused? Well, let's just dive into this right away. My name is Drew Bridewell. I'm head of Product and Design over at Grow Day. I'm also founder of Next Level UX and I've been doing these design critiques for over 16 years. And what I love about design critiques is the ability for you to shepherd your project work from point A to point B to point C and just continually iterating and getting that feedback. But a lot of teams and a lot of people will just go through the motion of not preparing for these sessions. They'll just show up inside of these meetings and they'll have their laptops open or they won't be really focused and intentional about what it is they're trying to get out of these sessions. I've worked at Facebook, I worked at LinkedIn, I worked on Lynda.com, envision, and I've seen so many critiques just go haywire because they're not preparing for the moment. So what I want you to do is if you're an IC on your team, or if you're even a leader inside your organization, think about how you can apply these practices into your team's fundamentals so that you can be setting your entire product team up for success and that you can advance your products faster, better, smarter, together. So without further ado, let's dive into this and I'm going to walk you through this inside of figma. And figma is a tool that you can use to basically do any ui, web design or, or you can even take notes and you can share your work inside of Figma as well. I really appreciate figma and everything they've done for the platform and, you know, let's just dive right into it. So right off the bat, I'm going to dive in and the very first thing that I want you to focus on when you are thinking about getting into a design critique or starting to think about, oh, well, I have a weekly design critique with my team and they have really, really strong opinions about, you know, how we should run this meeting. But either way, I think you can take a step back and start thinking about these four things. So the first thing that I want you to start thinking about is the context. What is the context of these design critiques? What are you trying to get out of them? And when you are starting to show up and you're coming to a design critique with your work, what's the context that you can set in a really, really quick way so that your team understands what it is that you're trying to show today? Like, what is the work, what does it look like? You gotta be able to set context really fast. So if you can write down on a piece of paper a couple of your ideas and a couple of the things that you're trying to get feedback on, whether it's like a landing page, whether it's a new experience where you're just introducing it for the very first time, your team try to set context incredibly fast and make this a discipline in how you do it every single time. The other thing that we need to think about is the people inside the room. Who are the people that are going to be showing up for this design critique or this design review? You know, whether it's a product review or whatever it is, who are the people that are going to be inside that meeting and what are their goals, what are their needs, what are they trying to get out of this? And what type of things can you answer in your work so that their needs can be, can be talked about, so that they can be encouraged or that they know exactly what needs to be done? So if you have a product manager or an engineer or content strategist, think about what they might need before you go into the session and write it down. Think about it. The other thing that we need to do is think about the goals of the project. What are the goals of the designs that you're trying to get across and present? You know, whether it's a user experience design or whether it's a Landing page for a marketing site, you got to understand the goals and what success really looks like. So if you could come in and thinking about what those are, then you can better prepare for the moments when you actually show them the work. And you're like, hey, this is my work. I want to get some feedback on this. All right, great. What are the goals of the project? What are the goals of this design? What are you trying to solve? What problem are you trying to solve? And having that prepared can really set you up for success. So so far, context, people and goals are so, so critical. The other thing is we really need to start creating focus in these meetings. You might only have 30 minutes or an hour long session. So when you think about that, you might only have two to three topics that you can talk about for five to 10 minutes. And then you gotta get feedback, you gotta hear that, the words and the communication from the rest of the crew. So you want to make sure that you're laser focused on exactly what you need to advance your project forward. Remember, it's a long term, it's a long journey from these design experiences. So you just want to be able to stay focused, focused on the one or two or three topics that you want to be able to move forward. Because you don't want to ask feedback around every single thing that you have in your design. You'll never get through the design critique. And you'll also get pretty worn out on all those different elements. All right, so that's number one, preparation. If you have questions about just preparation in general, please comment down below in the chat and we can talk about those things and help you elevate your preparation. But these four things are things that I do. Every single design critique. You gotta prepare for these moments. You gotta understand what they need. All right, the next one, super important part of design critiques and building a world class practice is facilitation. Facilitation is essentially just shepherding the conversation from point A to point B to point C to point Z and really helping the whole entire room feel a part of the journey, feel a part of what you're trying to create, fill a part. And because people are what they create, and people are, if they create with you, they're gonna help you along the way. So the first thing that we need to do is we need to think about collaboration. How are you facilitating collaboration inside of the room? If you got five people, if you got 10 people, think about how you can be prepared to help tap into those 10 people, those five people. So that they can help you move your project forward. If you're a design leader and you're facilitating the whole entire call for your whole entire team, think about how you can tap into specific people on your team that really have the subject matter expertise around the thing that you're critiquing. Now, not everybody's going to have something to say and that's totally okay, but you want to be able to facilitate the perspectives in the room so that you can make the thing that you're critiquing better and you can make the thing that you're critiquing better. Then you're going to be set up for success. Alright? The next thing that we need to do is we need to come back to focus, focus, focus, focus, focus, focus. What are we facilitating today? If you're a facilitator and you're running through a design critique, you want to make sure that those two to three topics that we prepared for the session, that the entire room knows. These are the three things that we're trying to get done today. You don't want designers and product managers and engineers and a lot of other people starting to pepper in a lot of different thoughts that are going to derail the conversation. You want to keep it super laser focused, you want to keep that intention in the room, but focus is going to be how you do that. The other thing that we need to do is think about communication, the style of communication for how you communicate to the room and how they all understand and they know. All right, well, we're going to be communicating this new idea. Let's be respectful, let's be honorable, let's really stay on topic and let's not be destructive. And we want to be able to keep the momentum of the designer coming into the room because we want them to keep showing their work. If we're really mean and really kind of not helpful and not constructive with the feedback that we're giving, then there's often times where the designer won't want to show their work. We want them to show their work early and often we want to have them sharing it in Slack. We want to help them sharing it in their presentation. So bring a next level communication quality bar to these conversations so that everybody understands that we're going to be respectful, we're going to be constructive and we're going to help you advance this idea further because that's what it's all about. We're a team and this is a journey in this project. So we're going to help you along the entire way. The last one here for facilitation is we really need to think about the people in the room. Like, which people in the room are going to have the biggest voices and how can we make sure that we're facilitating the people and the ideas and the perspectives in a really harmonious way. Right. If we have 10 people in the room, how can we make sure we're tapping into those 10 people? If you're facilitating the call and you are sharing the work up on the screen, remember that it's not about you, it's about the thing that you're presenting. So when you can have the thing that you're presenting up and ready to go, and, and you can tap into the product manager's ideas, the engineer's ideas, and you can really ask these open questions so that people feel comfortable and that they can come in and jump in and help with the thing. That's another huge, huge, huge, huge, really important thing. All right, let's keep going. I hope this is so far helpful. All right, so now we talked about preparation, we talked about facilitation. These are like this, preparing the mind and getting it ready. Because this is going to be a consistent, consistent practice that you do every, say, Monday or Wednesday. Like, for my team right now we have Mondays and Wednesdays. Wednesdays are big days for critiques if we're gonna have them. And it's important to think about what day of the week you're doing that, because the Tuesdays and Thursdays, on the other hand, are really for us to be able to advance the ideas. And then we do a lot of asynchronous, which is asynchronous feedback, which is just, you know, commenting inside of figma without everybody being in the same room at the same time. Because everybody is diverse and works across the world. So we don't have the same time window where we can always be in the room. Every time we look at the design work, it's a lot different than what it used to be. But if your whole team works in the same office, then you can set up consistent, consistent reviews that you can all be in the same room and do all of these things that we're talking about today. All right, so what are the topics? This is a really important session. So if you're about 30 minutes or an hour prepared for the session, you have a 30 minute or an hour presentation, you want to be able to set the context in the first one to five minutes of the conversation. You don't want to be talking for 15 minutes in front of your entire team and only give them 15 minutes to give you a review. You want to be able to be super sharp. One to five minutes. This is what we're doing. This is what it is. This is where we're at in the project. Just drop the context and do it really short, concise, focus. A lot of teams run into problems with this because they will talk forever, and then they won't give the participants in the room time to ask questions, time to really dive in deeper and really understand what they're trying to do. So we got to understand the context. Do it one to five minutes. The other thing we need to do is really understand the location of the project. Where is it at in the life cycle? Is it in the first couple of weeks? Are you just brainstorming, getting things going? You're early in ideas? Or is it towards the later end of the project where you literally. You're trying to get final sign off? You only have two weeks or two days or one day to get turn this around. And that's really important, too, because the feedback that you get might not be very helpful if you don't tell your team what the location is. So be sure to drop the location. Like, okay, I have two weeks left. This is where I'm at. This is the project. This is the problem we're trying to solve. Okay, got it, got it, got it. Okay. So you got to understand the location. And then to that point, when I called out this problem, there, you got to understand the problem. You got to be able to be like, okay, I'm trying to solve. The entry points of this app are really bad. Or the onboarding experience. We're getting feedback from customer service that it's just not very good. We're getting a lot of people dropping off once they hit this certain page, or we're trying to increase retention or. Or trying to increase conversion. What is the problem that you're trying to solve? Or maybe you're just, like, trying to simplify 10 steps to five steps, because 10 steps is too many in your product experience. So you gotta understand what the problem is and be able to articulate it back to your team very quickly, very efficiently. Like I said, one to five minutes. Do all these things in one to five minutes, and then you'll be good to go. All right. The last thing is the type of feedback that you're looking for. Like I was just saying before, if you're staying the problem of the product, you're talking about where you're currently at in the location, and you're giving the context of the overall, like, oh. The theme of where you're currently at, what type of feedback are you looking for? And what kind of type of feedback would be most important at this time to help you advance your idea or help you advance your project further, faster, better, smarter, together as a team. Right. What is that going to look like? And to do this, you just really got to get practice and do that preparation step ahead of time so that you get comfortable talking about your problem, talking about your project, talking about how to set context with it. You could do this with a friend, you could do this with a family member. Just walk around the block and talk about your project and really. Just get really sharp and really specific about what it is and talk about it really quickly, because you got to be mindful of the room, and you got to be mindful of how much time you have. 30 minutes to an hour is not that much time to be able to get that feedback that you really need to advance this stuff. Because if you miss that window of time where you're coming back and you're helping, you know, you might only have a couple opportunities to get this feedback because everybody's in the room. But if you miss that opportunity to get feedback, then you're going to miss the opportunity to do what is next. And what's next is really understanding the outcome. What is the outcome that you're really shooting for? So let's start with the first one here. So when you get this feedback, it's so important. Even though we haven't even finished the design critique, we want to think about how we're going to close the loop on the challenges and the problems that we already are facing inside the product experience. How are we closing the loop? Because when we get all this feedback and we're like, oh, yeah, this is great feedback. I'm gonna take this idea. I'm gonna take this idea. I'm gonna make this a little bit better. You don't have to take all the feedback, by the way. You can just analyze it, go into analysis mode, figure out, like, well, oh, this makes sense. This makes sense. I'm gonna tweak it a little bit here. I'm gonna tweak a little bit there. But think about how you're gonna close the loop, because in your next presentation, we're gonna. Or your next keynote talk, you're going to want to close the loop with your team so they know that you actually listened to them and you actually heard them, and you actually can Reiterate what it is that you changed and why you changed it. You want to be able to close a loop on all the work that you do. The other thing is we want to be able to know what the next steps are. So when you get feedback and you're in that session and you're like, okay, this is what we're doing. This is why it's important. You know, we're going to. We're going to iterate on this design. You want to be able to help your team know what. What's the next steps of your project? Well, next steps is we're going to be transitioning this into execution mode for engineers. So we're going to be documenting all of our designs, we're going to be locking the files, and we're going to be getting them ready into a place inside of Figmo so everybody can come in and go crush it and build it with excellence. You know, what are those next steps? The clarity that you have in articulating that is just as important to share it with your team as it is to know it from within. You want to be able to help model that behavior for your team as well. The other thing is, like, following through on the feedback. So if you do change something, reiterate to your team, like, what it is that you changed. So they actually know you heard them, and they actually know that you thought through the challenges and the problems that you actually got feedback on. If you don't do this, then it comes off like you don't really care about the feedback that you asked for in the session. Really come through, follow through what you're going to do. Have a reason why. Always know your why when you're designing so that you can reiterate this back to your product managers, your engineers, and everybody else that you work with. All right, so the next thing is the growth mindset. I want to encourage you also to really think about that. These projects and these things that you're getting feedback on, this feedback that you're getting on about, this thing is the thing. It's not you. It doesn't attach. It's not attached to your identity. It is attached to the quality of your work. But you got to really realize that you're always going to get better in these design critiques. You're always going to be showing your work. So if you have an opportunity to show your work in front of your entire team, take that opportunity. If you haven't presented your work in a couple weeks, take the opportunity to prepare a presentation and show Your work, you got to get in a habit of sharing your work so frequently and so just radically all the time that you're getting super confident with the work that you create. So important to do this and just know you always get a little bit better you and you're going to really improve this over the long term. So we talked about these, all these different things, right? We talked about setting, preparation, preparing for that early and often facilitating the moment, really coming in with your topics, A, B and C, so you know what it is you're going to do, why it's important. You also have the outcome in mind and thinking about how you're going to do this. And then we do this on a weekly basis. So if you have a design critique and it's scheduled every single day of the week or every single Wednesday, not every day of the week, that would be too much. You got to have that window of time, those two, three hour blocks, so that you can really push things forward and then get back into it. What I want to encourage you to do is think about the day of the week that you're going to have your design critique the day of the week that you're going to get that feedback. And then between that time that you get that feedback and the next time you present, you have time to advance the project further. And because you have that time, what we need to think about is we need to think about how we're measuring success of these design critiques and the impact of the feedback that you're getting, the impact from the team work that you're getting all the feedback from, and then how you're advancing it on a weekly basis. These sorts of things are going to be what helps you advance and move way faster. Because you're getting a lot of feedback. You're really, you know, you have that clarity of the entire team. When you don't have these moments where you can get this feedback from your team, you're losing a lot of momentum. And when a designer comes into these critiques, they want to build on the momentum they had when they came into the session. So you don't want to squash the momentum, you want to encourage the momentum, you want to keep these things going. And that is your design critique fundamentals and a masterclass for how you can elevate your practice in side of this discipline. Now, if you're an engineer or if you're a product manager, or if you're a designer just starting out, know that you'll get better at this over time. You don't have to be perfect. When you start this process out, it's really just about shepherding the information, getting that feedback, getting really good at preparing, getting really good at setting context, getting really good at facilitating the room and having fun with it because it's so much fun to facilitate these things sessions and then also getting really clear on what the goals and the outcomes are for what it is you're trying to present. Remember, don't come in with 10 things you want to get feedback on. Stick to like three or four things in that 30 minute session. Stick to three to four, maybe even eight things. If you're going to be having a full hour session, you can just go knock, knock, knock, knock, knock. But if you really are clear about what it is you're looking for, what it is you're trying to advance further, then you're going to be set up for success. And I'm going to. I just can't wait to see how you advance your projects moving forward. So get in there, get that feedback, facilitate these sessions and have a beautiful rest of your day.