D(esign) Playbook - Workflow
Effective Critique
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Keys to Effective Critique:
There are two roles: the presenter and the critiquer. The presenter shares the design, while the critiquer acts as the critic, offering informed thoughts or perspectives. (Both roles can involve multiple people.) Critiques can, and should be, crossdisciplinary. They can happen at any stage in a design process, and usually there will be different critique sessions for several iterations of the same design.
General towards an effective critique:
Clear scope for the conversation
Clear statement of agreed-upon design objectives for the work
Conversation rather than command
There are two main facilitation approaches to UX critiques:
Round robin. Participants share their perspectives one by one, making their way around the table.
Quotas. The facilitator gathers a specific, predetermined number of positive and negative comments from each participant. For example, each participant could share two aspects of the design that seems to accurately meet users’ needs, and one aspect that could be improved.
The Facilitators’ responsibilities will vary based on the plan, but may include time boxing, keeping conversation on track, and negotiating any tension.
An absolutely critical responsibility is communicating the scope and agenda for the critique. Below is an example agenda and communication towards keeping the scope and intention of the critique tight.
Finally some tips towards the facilitator “asking the right questions/keeping the feedback framed correctly” and “capturing/documenting the critique feedback.”
Asking the right questions - The role of the facilitator is to ask pressing questions to ensure that the presenter is getting the right feedback. The facilitator can reformulate questions or comments that sound opinionated (“This is too red!”) or directive (“I would have done it differently!”) to relate them to the goals of the design.
Documenting the discussion - A facilitator may also act as a recorder. In some cases, someone else on the team can adopt this role. The recorder should take notes publicly, using a collaborative editing tool, and should allow all participants to add additional observations and clarification in real time.
Keys to Effective Critique Presentation
Make your designs/artifacts readily available - Either prior to the critique or within the execution of the critique.
Repeat objectives - Prior to starting the critique, reiterate the goals of the work. Quickly summarize personas, current pain points, user tasks, or previous work. Another good starting point may be a high level sketch of the user flow after summarizing objectives. As mentioned above, it is also good idea to send out your work beforehand to avoid the initial reactive feedback based on someone’s gut reaction.
Tell a story. Generate a cohesive story to present the work in a way that concepts the audience to and through the problems you encountered and into your inspirations and decision points.
Present efficiently. Despite the temptation to overexplain as a means of defending every decisions try to be concise and to the point. After presenting, the team can always circle back to something that needs more discussion — but avoid eating up unnecessary time in the initial presentation. This approach to presenting will also have the added benefit of allowing your critiquers to see your work as your users may, without much explanation.
Citations/Learn More:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-critiques/
https://media.nngroup.com/media/articles/attachments/NNg_UXCritiqueCheatsheet.pdf
*Last updated 4/24/2020, please note this is for the purpose of allowing me to document and evolve my thoughts, experiences, and approach. I’d very much appreciate the opportunity to learn from you sharing yours. Reach out to me at jaydubois@gmail.com or @jaydubois