The art of feedback
It’s essential to learn how to give feedback. Many stakeholders don’t know how to provide critical feedback, or higher paid stakeholders have too much pride to learn proper feedback techniques. It all comes down to the level of empathy and humility in leadership — this is an unpopular suggestion most people avoid talking about.
Giving feedback is a skill on its own, something that takes time and practice to master.
There are two typical types of unproductive feedback. I won’t go too much into detail here, but I highly recommend reading Discussing Design.
- Reactive feedback 👎🏼 :
- Such things as “I don’t like it” or “this doesn’t work for me”, etc. This type of feedback is driven by someone’s personal expectations, desires, and values. Essentially, it’s a gut reaction.
- Directional 👎🏼:
- Sentences like “Add a dropdown to this button…” or “I think the CTA should be there…” or “Just follow what this app did…”. This individual is often looking for ways to bring the design more in line with their own expectations.
What we all really need is the third form of feedback:👍🏼 Critical feedback — the most helpful form of feedback designers actually need.
- It’s objective focused.
- It identifies use cases that designers may have overlooked.
- It provides context and data that helps decision-making.
Critical thinking about how we find solutions to a problem is a part of every team member’s role — not just designers.
This is a simple reframing guide I’ve put together. I shared this with my team during retros so we can slowly get on the same page. When building a critical feedback habit is new to a company, it’s important to allow time to work towards the shared vocabularies. This however, takes time, so be patient.
⭐️ Amp up your review culture with these pro-tips
Activities I’ve implemented for my team that worked towards empowering review sessions.
- Involve stakeholders during the ideation stage — make it fun! Be creative. Get a space offsite make it a half- or full-day team activity. Turn it into a treat — pizza, beer and lollies.
- Know your customers — establish a feedback loop and implement the loop into design > review cycles
- Everything should be designed for a reason. Back up your designs with: Data shows …/ Hypothesis is that… / User feedback suggests..etc — it’s worthwhile to amp up your team with qualitative and quantitative data measuring tools (Fullstory / Mixpanel / Amplitude, etc). If the reason behind a design is “this stakeholder likes or dislikes”, then we’ve got a much bigger problem to solve.
- Always share designs with engineers, PMs and relevant customer success team member before review, so that you can answer questions regarding feasibility and usability.
- When presenting to a large group of stakeholders (seven or more). Instead of open discussions which can easily lead to overtime, break down into smaller groups or implement a questionnaire feedback method. (See expert tips by Devin below.)
Steal these tips from other design leaders
“Different design stages means different types of reviews. We’d keep stakeholder informed at high level. Design team will check in with PM and Eng once a week and present to stakeholders when we’re 80% there”
Mattis — Design Lead @Joseph
“Have an effective feedback loop is key to help designers get prepared for reviews. My best hire was the Research Ops Manager — He removed the blocker for designers to organise user testing sessions. Our user feedback sessions are now in flow with design sprints.
Lisi — Design Director @Deputy
“Align with Engineering and Product, then with Stakeholders — this way we were ready with answers to such questions or comments such as “Oh, we can’t do that, this will take X weeks!” or “Will this feature, or change effect our current or near sprints in any way?” etc.
“Such things as “I don’t like it” or “this doesn’t seem right to me”, etc. were unacceptable and were disregarded, and everyone in the room were made aware of that ahead of time.”
YAN — Head of Design @ Unveil.Social
“Designers should show design flows 2 times — because it’s quite hard for stakeholders to understand the full scope in the 1st round. 1st round — present with full context and data points. 2nd round -presentation with reduced context. You can also send everyone a link to the prototype so that they can interact with it for better understanding.
Mitali Desai — Design research lead @ Bunnings
“We present our designs in a webinar format, and feedbacks were submitted via a survey form (link shared with all participants before review begins).
In the feedback survey we asked: Do you have a question or a comment? with added note: we can’t do anything with comments like”I don’t like it..etc” or “this won’t work” without context. Please voice your feedback in this format “I feel/believe x will do y because z.”
After the presentation, product team gather together to consolidate all feedbacks received and prioritise accordingly.”
Devin @ ex research ops @ Verizon NYC
“Share the guidelines so that people in the review meeting can refer to it. Ask someone outside of the design team to facilitate the review according to the guideline so it doesn’t feel that you’re imposing rules on the reviewers.
Help them build the review muscle — even if they understand they guidelines, it’s easy to fall back to old behaviours.”
Elena Borisova — Head of Product Design @ DeepL
In summary
Creating a healthy and safe review culture takes time and investment. Leadership needs to initiate the iterative culture, and be the first to adhere on guidelines and they should encourage others to do the same.
At the end of the day, let everyone exercise judgement in their own areas of expertise, and trust them to proceed with decisions towards the “north star”.
Successful product teams are open to experimentation and learn from their mistakes. They trust each other’s expertise. They focus on outcomes, not outputs. They believe growth means trial and error. They provide feedback with empathy, and encourage each other to learn things in a different light.
And that’s a wrap.
Thanks for taking your time to read all part 1, part 2 and part 3 of this article.
If you’d love to share your feedback or ask a question, feel free to contact me on Linkedin or contact me on jacalin.com😊
