The Designer’s Role in Shaping Review and Feedback
By Jonathan Hoff, UX/UI Designer
At Measures for Justice, we build tools and services to empower communities, and the institutions that serve them, to reshape how the criminal justice system works. Our users are at the core of what we do, and our design review process is essential to not only understanding our users’ needs, but to also making sure our tools deliver the positive impact we intend them to have.
Review and feedback are essential to the design process—especially in today’s world of software platforms, a product can be seen and used by tens of millions of people. That’s why it’s generally a good idea to get a few eyes on a design before developing it and releasing it for public use.
I want to talk specifically about the role the designer plays in this process, and, in effect, how their role is central to their team’s ability to make effective decisions and create excellent experiences. If you’re reading this as a designer or a feedback-giver, you probably know the many traps design review and feedback can fall into:
- Designers chase after stakeholders who don’t have scheduled time to give necessary feedback,
- Ideas or assumptions get added to designs which lead to scope creep, and
- Keeping the actual problem being solved in focus gets harder the longer a design is held up by review.
There’s no one person or reason to blame for review and feedback cycles going haywire, but there are things designers can do to make these cycles smoother for everyone involved. By embracing the role, a designer can create a lot of freedom in the formatof review and feedback, producing greater value for both your teams and products beyond simply catching typos or inconsistencies in the UI.
Further on, I include tips for leading review sessions, suggestions for how to experiment and find your ideal workflow—including what we’ve done at Measures for Justice—and also list some signs that will let you know when it’s all working.
You are here: Your Organization’s Current Review Process & Format
My first tip is to establish where you’re at. Ask yourself: What is the current review process? What area do I have the most control over? What is the outcome I want to achieve? Every work environment is complex, and each is unique; you know how your coworkers will respond to change and what their tendencies are in your current review sessions. How do they operate? Do they value dedicated time in a meeting to hash out questions and get final approval? Or do they respond well to the flexibility of asynchronous feedback and appreciate being able to write out their thoughts? Whatever the case may be, asking yourself basic questions about how your reviewers think and act will help you think about what format your team would be the most open to adopting and would facilitate the most productive conversations in your team.
Guidelines for Designers when considering an alternative design review format
In order to deliver more value through your organization’s design review format, it’s important to implement effective strategies that promote clear communication, transparent collaboration, and constructive feedback. Here are some general guidelines that can help you optimize your review and feedback process.
Respect people’s time
A key challenge designers face is work being kicked around for weeks at a time, which can be explained by one simple fact of our modern life: Everyone’s busy, all the time.
To combat this, provide options for those you need feedback from to answer your questions on their own time. Make the links or projects you’re working on readily available in your message requesting feedback. Send out requests for feedback well ahead of a design’s deadline (ideally 1-2 weeks). And finally, send reminders!
These tips can help ensure your reviewers aren’t opening your file for the first time the day your design is due.
Explain your thinking
Give context for your designs and spell out the items you’re looking for feedback on. It’s easy for reviewers, when not provided with any guidance, to critique a design based on whatever sticks out to them. That’s human nature! So give those reviewing your work a set of specific items to look over. Avoid leading questions, and be curious over defensive. Reviews are a time for everyone to share their ideas on how to potentially solve the problem at hand.
Designer’s are often seen as the person with all the ideas or solutions, but in reality, everyone working on the product plays a role as a designer and should be comfortable with giving ideas. The designer’s role, when soliciting feedback, is more similar to a facilitator who makes sure that everyone in the group is heard and feels comfortable sharing their ideas. Each organization is different, and each team has their own obstacles, which may be due to lack of trust or unproductive communication styles.
If you’re following up on changes made from a previous round of review, note where things have changed in the design inside of your workspace, including what the conversation and consensus was during that last meeting. The closer these notes are in proximity to the designs, the better.
Stay flexible and adapt
Sometimes reviewers are happy to give their opinions, their interpretation of the problem at hand, and answer questions, especially if you’ve already set up a regular cadence of meetings and rapport with those reviewing your work. Other times, when you’re working with a new team or are working in a new area, being able to walk everyone through the topic and requirements for a design can go a long way to making your reviewers feel qualified and confident sharing their opinions.
It’s natural for team members to potentially have some uncertainty about a new meeting format. Engage with those concerns. Meet this resistance with grace and understanding. If you’re trying to build change, be prepared to answer questions. You will (at least temporarily) become the point person for your team to answer questions as everyone acclimates to the new way of things. And if you need support in the meantime, make sure you have a team member or two that can provide that support to back you up.
Don’t be afraid to experiment
With so many frameworks and tools for meeting and working today, it’s true that there’s no one right way to collaborate with your team, so don’t be afraid to experiment. At Measures for Justice, our design process has undertaken some ambitious projects in the last year, including our website redesign. Over 30 pages were designed, all of which were reviewed and iterated on multiple times. Throughout the project, we went from reviewing designs only in meetings, to providing video walkthroughs of new designs, before finally using Figma as an asynchronous workspace for design consensus while requiring less meetings.
Play with the medium, see what’s engaging for some, a drag for others, and find a middle ground. But also know that it takes time to create new processes.
Get Meta with it: Feedback on your Feedback!
Feedback is the name of the game, and if you’re looking to improve the efficiency and engagement of your design reviews, you could also be using that time to ask the people around you how their experience has been. Have they been/are they able to be engaged? Are there ways to include more voices? Did everyone have access to the materials? Was there adequate time for everyone to clarify their thoughts and ideas? These questions and more can come up as a result of fine-tuning your review process. The only way to address them is to openly seek the answers out, and it also allows others to see you as a willful collaborator.
An Example
No design practice is a monolith. Review practices will differ per team and, sometimes, per project. Speaking from experience, Measures for Justice’s design team has moved from scheduling time ad hoc for large design reviews, to having a regular scheduled time for design reviews. We do this with a small team of designers, developers, and product managers, known as the “product trio,” a term coined by Teresa Torres. This enables these three teams to maintain an open line of communication for new designs and user feedback as they are being worked on. A regular schedule for design review has many benefits, including a better team relationship, increased agility to reframe problems when new feedback is received, and much more. Through this change, our design team has noticed and learned our reviewers habits, which have helped shape our format and process.
At a time when our organization was struggling with death-by-meetings, the ability to move more decision-making and review tasks outside of meetings was a welcome reprieve. So, that’s what we did! A group Slack was created and when it’s time to review, a designer shares a link to the design file, a note on what needs review, what had been agreed on previously, and the deadline for feedback. Reviewers could then hop into the file and leave comments on their own time.
This asynchronous solution solved nearly all of our problems, all except one. We couldn’t reach consensus asynchronously. Reviewers were understandably reluctant to explain their thoughts via Slack, which would have been a larger time-drain than meeting with the group face-to-face. So, again, that’s what we did! We facilitated providing feedback asynchronously, and then scheduled a meeting to reach final consensus. This way of working freed up time for everyone involved, designers and reviewers alike.
Conclusion
Change is hard! A few tries are always required to get used to new ways of working, but waiting an adequate amount of time before expecting everyone to be on the same page and working more efficiently may draw your attention to the real rewards of a new way of working. Are your coworkers more involved? Are designs being approved ahead of deadlines? Do you have regular feedback to work off of? These are all potential benefits that don’t require a perfected process. By sticking with it, you will continue to see more benefits emerge over time.
Measures for Justice has evolved its design, development, and product practices to reflect their maturity. With maturity has come a wealth of resiliency to our workflow and ability to deliver great experiences that help communities create the impact they want to have. Our platform Commonsis already delivering on that mission. Stay tuned and follow Measures for Justice to see what we do next!
