This week was dedicated to a design critique of our Autonomous Vehicle UI projects. I was a little further behind with this project than where I would like to be but I was still able to deliver a working prototype for the critique.
As for my feedback it was a bit of a bruising critique as I faced some criticism for my decision to link both the adult and children parts as one UI. I could see the value in this feedback from a design point of view certainly in terms of providing the best user experience for both adults and children separate UIs make sense. I do however still disagree that there was a safeguarding issue based on the fact that this was designed to be an experience that parents and children shared, therefore the children should never have had access to the features unsupervised. However it is still not a bad idea to remove that possibility by splitting into two separate user interfaces.
Other feedback surrounded some design tips and suggestions all of which I will take onboard as I look to improve my UI for submission.
We also looked at the brief for our third and final project for this module, an app to educate either 10-year-olds or undergraduate students about the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
I have to admit I believe this week’s critique to be the hardest I have dealt with in all the critiques I have taken part in up to now. I think the feedback questioning the safety of my app was hard to hear and deal with. While I realise the questions were genuine it is still tough to be asked such a searching question on the very premise of the design. For this reason I wanted to look online for some advice and tips for both handling and giving better feedback at design critiques.
I started my look into design critiques by reading this article https://uxdesign.cc/5-tips-for-better-design-critiques-12d7a8c9a069 on Medium. It had some good ideas on giving feedback, I particularly liked the reminder that the work you are critiquing was created by another human, another designer and therefore not to forget to keep in mind their feelings wen offering critique. A lot of people talk of using a sandwich approach of good point followed by a bad point finished with another good point and while this could work it seems disingenuous for me to be hunting for good points just to be able to point out something I feel could do with being looked at again. The author of this piece says that the sandwich approach is not necessary, just a consideration for the other person’s feelings and if I’m honest I’m yet to see a design in a critique that did not have merit either in the underlying idea or the visual style.
The two other points offered in this article that I felt could help me are to write down all the feedback you receive and to not overlook feedback outside of the formal design critiques. I do always try and keep notes on my feedback as even if I don’t agree with it, I like to at least consider it, by having notes of my feedback I find that I can let any emotion of the critique session settle before looking at then feedback again and judging it with a clearer head. I think the suggestion to make sure and take on all feedback outside of design critiques is an important point it is all too easy especially when you know there is a critique scheduled to ignore other feedback and wait to see the results of the critique. However, I agree with the author of this article that the feedback offered outside of a critique is likely to be the same feedback you receive during the critique. Therefore, if you take it onboard earlier you can avoid hearing the same point again in the critique and that will allow the other members of your team to offer other suggestions and advice.
After this article I went back to looking for other articles on design critiques and found this https://www.figma.com/blog/design-critiques-at-figma/ written by the vice-president of product design at Figma on how they have changed their critiques to make them more productive and useful.
“Our driving philosophy is the belief that critiques should be motivating, not
intimidating. Helpful, not discouraging.”
Source: https://www.figma.com/blog/design-critiques-at-figma/ (Last Accessed 30/12/23)
I really like this quote, I believe it sums up what everyone wants from a critique, something that motivates you, where you leave enthused by new ideas and suggestions from a wide range of different viewpoints. Unfortunately, critiques don’t always work out this way and the Figma product team were finding issues in their critiques that led them to look critically at the critiques themselves.
They found several issues with their critiques but one that stood out to me and that I feel can be unhelpful in critiques is:
“There were a lot of unhelpful “group think” and “+1s”.
Source: https://www.figma.com/blog/design-critiques-at-figma/ (Last Accessed 30/12/23)
I agree with this strongly there is nothing worse for me than seeing a piece of feedback repeated multiple times or with slightly different wording. Critiques are collaborative exercises if someone spots something to give feedback on then that’s great, it doesn’t gain more importance because someone else has spotted it and added a +1. I respect everyone that gives feedback on my work and therefore whether a piece of feedback is mentioned once or by everyone I will consider it and see if taking it onboard will improve my design.
Figma then came up with six different styles of critiques which they felt worked for different end goals and could be helpful. I was most interested in their “Silent Critique” method as this seems to be quite close to what we do already in class using Miro. The main reason for a silent critique is the ability to have people commenting on different areas all at the same time, maximising the amount of feedback you can receive in a certain time frame in comparison to when someone is speaking where only one topic of conversation can happen at any one time. It also offers the advantage of having all your feedback written down for you to review at your own pace. I think this could be a useful critique method, I do feel you would need to be given time to really look at a project and think about the feedback you would like to give rather than being rushed onto looking at another project. But if this could be organised, I would really like to try the silent critique method.
One issue that a silent critique could throw up is how to give people offering feedback enough context to your project. I feel this sometimes is an issue, where if you don’t fully understand the problem statement the design is trying to solve or the use case for the project then it can be difficult to offer relevant feedback. A way of explaining your project to the audience would need to be included as part of the design file offered for critique.