Imagine the following scenario: You’ve prepared some designs and deliberated over details for days. You want some feedback and ideas on what direction to take. You manage to schedule some time in teammate’s calendars and book a room for next week. The day comes and the floor is yours. Then Karl the PM sees the designs and launches a monologue about your product strategy. You don’t have a new direction. You have a headache. You also have a bunch of teammates sat wondering why the hell they got pulled into this meeting.

Sound familiar?

Design critiques are a part of everyday life for many Product Designers. The quality and timing of a good critique can be a catalyst for new ideas and solving old problems. However, many leave them with more questions than answers. It’s not that people want to cause problems. They just aren’t taught how to help you.

This article can help you get the best from your teammates in the next critique you facilitate.

Critique format

Before you can plan your critique, it’s best to start with deciding upon the format. Given the world’s shift to working online, remote design critiques might be a good place to start.

The benefits of a remote critique are:

1. You aren’t dependant on securing expensive meeting spaces
2. You can solicit feedback from talented people anywhere in the world

If structured well, a remote critique can also reduce bias, organize feedback, and can be extended to be asynchronous. If you decide to have a silent critique in which feedback is captured without discussion, this can help focus attention.

If you‘re in need of different feedback, look to Figma for inspiration. An overview of their critique process can be seen in their toolbelt below:

However, if it feels like the right time for a silent critique, follow the six steps below to help you get the best results.

Process

Step #1: Determine what you need to critique

At each stage of the product design process, you’ll need different feedback to make effective decisions. The artefacts you show during a critique should reflect this. Don’t show hi-fi screens if you want to gain feedback on an initial user journey. Don’t show wireframes when discovery research could articulate the problem you’re trying to solve better.

Step #2: Determine who needs to attend

Think about who can offer the most value to the design process at the stage it’s at. While this could be a director or CEO, in the early stages it’s more likely to be developers, fellow designers, product managers, and those working with users. Be intentional in whose time you ask for.

Step #3: Set clear expectations

Regardless of what feedback you’re looking for in a design critique, you need to set clear expectations. Do this by including five things when introducing a crit session:

Project background: Provide a brief reminder of the business and customer goals that conceived this project.

What feedback you’re looking for: If you’re exploring user journeys, make it clear that you want feedback on how content and features are explored from screen to screen.

What you’re not looking for feedback on: Make it clear what isn’t useful at this point. For exploring user journeys with wireframes, supporting copy might exist to provide an idea of the content but the details of which don’t need scrutinizing right now.

Things to remember: Ask people to be honest and open, and prioritize suggestions and questions. This encourages constructive thinking that leads to better products. For more ideas on how to frame critique etiquette, read GV’s guide to Design Critiques by Braden Kowitz.

Clear instruction: Ask people to provide thoughts, questions, concerns, and suggestions as Figma comments. This enables you to document feedback from each owner so you can follow up later.

Step #4: Time to critique

Ask your teammates if they have any questions that need to be answered in order to contribute useful feedback. When somebody asks something directly related to the product or design, say “That’s a great question! Can you put it in as a comment so that I have it on record?”. Tell people how long they have to leave comments and set a timer. If you’re feeling fancy, you can even use a Figma Timer plugin.

At the end of your session, you should end up with a wealth of comments. The outcome of this process helped me in a recent critique which can be seen below (content blurred of course). The instructions for the session are listed in the top left. Three different ideas for a UX flow were critiqued on the right.

Step #5: Conclude the session

Conclude the session by addressing specific comments. This does three things:

1. Address key concerns while you have everyone’s attention
2. Answer questions and tell the owners you’ll come back to them later if need be.
3. Call out great suggestions and questions that will help you improve the design

In doing these, you emphasize your teammate's time is well spent. This is crucial if you want people to participate in a critique again!

Step #6: Collate feedback

Following your session, collate comments in a Google Sheet. List each comment, its owner, and the screen or section it relates to. To the right of this, list your next steps. Examples of next steps include following up with a stakeholder or exploring alternative UI treatments. You can refer to this list when referencing design decisions in the project documentation.

Optional step: Extend the critique

If you want more feedback, post a link to the Figma board in a relevant Slack channel with an open call for feedback. Alternatively, send a link to anybody else as you see fit. Tell them that there’s instruction on what’s expected in the Figma file and if they’ve got any questions they can just ask. Set a deadline for when feedback will be closed.

This allows you to collect feedback asynchronously without using your time. Be aware that this can increase the chance of biased comments as it will allow people time to read any existing comments.

Outcomes

Even with a perfect structure, a single critique isn’t a silver bullet. Yet a sequence of them can help you design better products and bring your team along in the process. People leave each session feeling they were able to contribute to the project effectively and you establish clear next steps. With a remote critique, you can achieve this from anywhere, and more importantly anyone in the world.

Next steps

Given the current climate and the requirement to work from home as a result, why not take this as an opportunity to improve your remote processes?

If you want to build a habit of facilitating better critiques, learn how to set OKRs as a Product Designer and make it your goal next month. You could take it a step further and coach your team on how to do the same!

Other articles on critiques

• Tanner Christensen gives us a peek into how design critiques are conducted at Facebook.
• Noah Levin gives us a detailed look into how different critique formats are used in the Figma design team.

Silent design critiques: making your design team more effective was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Three design heavyweights give their suggestions.

One of my favourite quotes is from the creator of Dilbert, Scott Adams:

“Losers have goals and winners have systems”

Your success isn’t determined by the audacity of your goal but by the habits and routines that make up your day.

As product designers, it’s difficult to create this system when things change so quickly. Technologies change. Teams change. Strategies change. And sooner or later, everything will change. This makes it difficult to prioritise what to focus on over the next few months.

This comes with experience. But for the impatient among us, we need the next best thing: Hindsight! With this mind, I asked three of the top product designers I knew a simple question:

“What’s a habit or routine that you would test in 2020 to become a more effective contributor?”

Below are the action-packed answers that they provided.

Daniel Burka
Director of product and design at Resolve to Save Lives, ex-Google Ventures

Make opportunities for yourself

A lot of designers look for currently available career paths and choose the best one they can. That narrows your options when you realize that a lot of options aren’t there until you create them. Talk to lots of people and look for where you could contribute your skills to a challenge you find exciting.

Ship. And, measure.

A long time ago, Dave Morin and I were discussing how few designers were able to successfully ship coherent products. There are even fewer who can ship and measure their work. To ship works means coordinating with everyone in the development chain from devs, to PMs, to marketing, to leadership. And measuring means developing strong processes for rapid qualitative measurement pre- and post-launch, and then strong qualitative metrics post-launch. Most designers are weak across this spectrum. Arguably these are your greatest skills.

Write about your work.

I used to think that writing was just pure ego (not totally wrong). But writing is also great for understanding why you made decisions and also important for helping your peers to do better work. Kevin Rose told me once that you don’t need to be “universally correct” about something to write or talk about it… you just need to tell the story of something that worked for you. That really lowers the bar and makes writing feel safer.

Chris Clarke

Design Manager at Babylon Health, ex-The Guardian

Read lots about your practice

Dribbble, Awwwards, Mobbin are all great for visual inspiration. But how do we get better at the non-visual stuff? How do you get better at facilitation or handling difficult conversations? There are millions of resources out there and it takes dedication to sift through and find the gems.

Actually practice what you read, and share what you learn

We’re all guilty of reading something new where we get a hit of dopamine and do nothing about it. Challenge yourself by only reading a new article/book once you’ve actioned and shared at least one thing from the last.

Learn to ask effective questions

We’re all a product of our thoughts. And our thoughts are the result of questions. These can be questions others ask us or those we ask ourselves. This article from the Harvard Business Review helps you ask better questions. If you want to reset your brain, ask yourself the 10 questions that changed Tim Ferriss’ life.

To write more consistently, this article is a result of one of these questions:

“What would this look like if it were easy?”

daniel harvey

Creative Director at Babylon Health, ex-RGA, ex-SapientNitro

Practice radical inclusion
Empathy and imagination are no replacement for actual co-creation with diverse audiences.

Working closely with people that live different lives, from different backgrounds can give you a perspective you never would’ve had otherwise. Foster a habit of including people from different disciplines and user groups throughout your design process.

Tom Harman

Senior Design Manager Monzo

The advice Tom offered is especially relevant in the disruptive times of Coronavirus:

Follow the money
With society turned on its head and so much economic uncertainty, now is a key time to consider how your design work directly impacts the bottom line of the business you’re in. Are there good opportunities for design to have an outsized impact on increasing revenue or reducing costs?

Visual storytelling
Design’s superpower is visualising the future — or even the complicated present. Think beyond the UI your users will interact with and how you might leverage visual aids like maps, diagrams or even video to bring clarity and humanity to the teams you work with.

Assume the best intent
With all the change happening in the world right now, it’s more important than ever to see things from other perspectives, whether that’s of your customers or your teammates. Everyone is doing their best to get through a tough time, but people are experiencing different kinds of stress. With remote working the norm communication is now more fractured than usual, so do your best to bring a positive attitude and be kind.

Read this article if you want detailed steps on how to create your own system to improve as a Product Designer.

Thank you to Daniel Burka, Chris Clarke,Daniel Harvey and Tom Harman for offering their advice 🙏 I hope you find it as actionable as I have!

7 habits for becoming a more effective product designer was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’ve all heard the story of the underdog that had an audacious goal. Nobody thought a mile could be run in under 4 minutes until Roger Bannister proved them wrong in Oxford in 1954. Nor that black holes could be photographed until the Event Horizon Telescope captured the first image of a supermassive black hole in the centre of a galaxy 58 million light-years away.

Although inspiring, the problem with these goals is that they don’t actually help you achieve them. What you need are the systems that make them a reality: a morning running routine or how you test and optimize telescope technology. Dilbert creator Scott Adams puts it well:

“Losers have goals and winners have systems”.

— Scott Adams

When markets evolve quickly, so does the rate at which business priorities change. This is why setting goals as a product designer is particularly challenging. Measuring the impact of the products we design can be hard. Measuring our growth as product designers can be even harder.

I wanted a more structured way to measure my growth as a designer and have managed to fine-tune my approach over the past 12 months. Read on if you’re looking for:

1. Peace of mind that you’re growing as a Product Designer
2. Confidence that you’re an effective contributor to a team
3. Evidence to support the promotion or pay-rise discussions in your next review

Step #1: Define the biggest challenges that your team faces

In many technology companies, a team strives to accomplish a set of company goals as part of a larger group. If this is you, you’re likely to know the challenges you face. In the case of a budding startup, this might be the pursuit of product/market fit. In the case of a scale-up, it might be how you can make your products more engaging. And in the case of larger organisations, it might be how you increase your profit margins so the price of your stock rises.

For example, a challenge your organisation faces might be to make your products accessible to more people. As a product designer, you could interpret this as anything from designing a comparable experience for those with disabilities or adapting your products for different cultures around the world. Whatever the challenges are that your team face, start by defining the role product design can play in solving them.

Step #2: Ask for personal feedback from the teammates in your squad

Whether part of a formal process or your own initiative, the next step is to gather feedback on how you’re contributing to the company goal from other members of your squad. Asking for feedback can be hard and Facebook’s VP of Product Design Julie Zhou does a fantastic job of explaining how you can approach it:

“Ask people all the time for feedback. Make your asks specific, and your tone curious so it’s safe for the other person to tell something critical. People know when you’re just fishing for compliments”.

For example:

✅ After an ideation session, ask attendees “How effective was that session in establishing next steps? How could it be twice as effective in the future?”

❌ Just before a performance review with your manager, “Can you give me some feedback to help me write my 2020 goals by the end of the day?”

An example of good peer feedback would be if your tech lead advised you to use lo-fi artefacts earlier and more often to help establish technical restraints around the new ideas you propose before investing too many resources in dead ends.

Step #3: Get inspiration from a progression plan

The next step is to use a progression plan to articulate what success looks like. A progression plan is a tool that helps people understand how to progress in their organisation and the pay and recognition they should receive as they do. While you might not have one for your organisation, you can still use others as inspiration. If this is the case, check out the examples of other company’s progression plans in the resources and useful links at the bottom of this article.

Step #4: Set your objective

Progression plan in hand, determine the competency that best aligns with your squad goal, your peer feedback and the level you aspire to be. Using Intercom’s progression plan as an example, your objective could be to deliver design at a senior level. To meet Intercom’s expectation, you’ll need to ‘drive how your team improves shipping’ and ‘make smart trade-offs’. Use this to inspire your objective and focus on demonstrating specific behaviour.

✅ Demonstrate the ability to drive how your team improves shipping.

✅ Demonstrate the ability to make smart trade-offs when shipping.

❌ Deliver the designs for feature X (Part of improving shipping involves effective team collaboration and buy-in for building, not just completing the designs in a silo and throwing them over the wall)

Step #5: Set your key results

After you’ve determined your objectives, you need to decide what key results will help you achieve them. These are the things that will help you track and in turn build the habits and routines that make up your system. Focus on specific actions and deliverables.

✅ Provide three examples of when lean UX practices have led to faster delivery of designs

❌ Provide an example of when a product was shipped quickly.

✅ Provide three examples of when you empowered your squad to prioritise the user when making trade-offs with insights from prototype testing.

❌ Provide three examples of when you convinced the team to go with your decision

Step #6: Pilot your system for a set period

Now that you’ve decided upon your initial objectives and key results, spend a set period of time piloting your new system. For a six month plan, I used the first month as a pilot. Include evidence of how you’re delivering key results each month. This can help raise red flags before you commit to a longer month plan. You might find that the key result you’ve written down is too dependent on things outside of your control and you’d benefit from reducing its scope. Or you might discover that two of your key results are competing for the results you deliver and they need to be combined into one.

Step #7: Use Trello for tracking daily progress

Finally, use Trello or something similar to track your progress towards each objective. My method is to dedicate columns to Backlog, To-do this week, and for each of the objectives I’m working towards. Create a card for each key result and assign a deadline and a tag for the objective it’s working towards. As you make progress on each, attach evidence such as decks, design files, Google docs, screenshots etc to the card. Upon completion, move it into the column for the objective. This will provide you with easy access to what you’ve delivered each month.

You can see a template Trello board that includes example tickets for this article here.

Management consultant Peter Drucker said: “What gets measured gets managed”. The trouble with measuring design is it depends on the value you deliver to your user and this is unique to each team. A system like this might not give you a quantitative way to measure your design work. However, if you’re like me, it can help provide:

• Peace of mind that you’re growing as a Product Designer
• Confidence that you’re an effective contributor to a team
• Evidence to support the promotion or pay-rise discussions in your next review

Quick links to Progression plans from well-known companies

• Buzzfeed
• Financial Times
• Intercom
• Monzo
• Basecamp
• Buzzfeed
• Clearleft
• GOV.UK
• Spotify
• Zendesk

Useful tools

• Trello board with example tickets for this article
• Scrum for Trello plugin for tracking time spent on tickets

Further reading on growing as a Product Designer

• Designing a Better Career Path for Designers at Facebook
• How we built the Figma design team
• Evaluating Employees in Product Design & Development Roles at Twitter

Growing as a product designer: “losers have goals and winners have systems” was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In this short article, you’ll learn:

How to use Facebook Insights to discover the basic information of 2000 people that are interested in your product in the space of 7 days.

How you can plug this information into UserTesting to determine how you can make better decisions when it comes to the design of your website or app.

Great digital platforms are designed with their user’s decisions in mind. As an entrepreneur or startup, it’s easy to think you have to wait until you build a product and have existing users before you can do this. However, a study conducted by the legendary UX consultancy: Nielson Norman Group found that you only need to test your product with five participants to gain 80% of the insights you need to make key decisions on how you can improve it.

The trouble for many entrepreneurs and startups is that they either don’t know who their target market is or they don’t want to waste time setting up and conducting interviews because they’re busy doing other super-important-only-I-can-do-it things.

The solution? UserTesting. It’s a service that enables you to test your website or app remotely with people whether it’s a polished site or still in basic wireframe form. However, In order to get the most out of this service, you first need to specify who you want to test with based on their demographic information. “But what if I don’t know the demographic information of my users?” You ask. This article outlines a way to collect this from thousands of people that take an interest in what you offer for £50.

Using Facebook to gain your target audience

While reports and public data on different market demographics are available, none will give you data on those interested in your offer specifically. To gain this data, we can use a video campaign in Facebook. Don’t have a video for your product you say? Check out this podcast episode on creating a high performing video ad from Digital Marketer on how to create one without spending a fortune.

The question I always get asked when I suggest this is “why use Facebook to collect this data instead of asking people you already know?”

A Facebook video funnel allows you to collect information from thousands of people that show interest in your specific offer from the comfort of their natural environment, when it’s their own choice.

The four steps for gaining the demographic data we need are:

1. Create a basic video demonstrating your product or service
2. Create a Facebook ad campaign with that video
3. Create a custom audience of those that watched 75%+ of the video
4. Use Facebook Insights to determine the demographic information of this custom audience

Demographic data collection in action

In order to demonstrate the results of the funnel above, I decided to run a short campaign for my dad. As a wood sculpture he often makes wooden bowls as a lower cost product for those interested in his handmade work. As with any new online store I build, I aim to keep it as user-centered as possible so the first step was gaining the data on who

£50 in campaign ad spend got the following results:

Of the total 13,041 paid views (There were 18k+ including organic), two custom audiences were built. The first was the 2000 people that watched to the 75% mark and the second was the 1600 that watched to the 95% mark. With these audiences, I could then use the Facebook Audience Insights tool to see info on those that were interested in what was on offer.

The insights pulled from the 2000 people that watched 75% or more for a cost of £0.025 each influenced the selection of interview participants in the following way:

Facebook Insight

Impact on Interview participant selection

• 64% of the audience is male
• 3 of the participants should be male
• 45% of the audience is married
• At least two of the participants should be married
• 67% have a university degree
• 3 of the participants should have a university degree

Now that you know what interview participants to recruit based on their basic information, you’re ready to plug the information into UserTesting. Most importantly, you now know that you haven’t picked these 5 people at random, but with statistical evidence. However, there’s so much more you can do with this information. You can:

• Build a detailed persona of your user to make more informed decisions when you or your designer is making UX and UI decisions on product design.
• Use your custom audiences to remarket to with a free offer in exchange for an email address, ready for when you launch your product.

So there we have it, a way in which you can be confident that the five people you test remotely with are going to yield the insights you need to make better decisions when it comes to the design of your website or app.

While selling more prints wasn’t likely to offer the growth they wanted, increasing the output of their high quality picture frames might. Instead of going down the traditional route of offering this as a stand alone product with a big launch after many months, King & McGaw wanted to validate the idea as quickly and as cheaply as possible before committing to a long-term project.

Enter: Google Ventures 5-day Design Sprint…

Within this article, you’ll learn:

• How you can test the best way to grow your online store in 5 days.
• How you can expect a one-day prototype to differ from a final product.
• How customers may respond to a new app on your online store.
• How much alcohol you can drink in a week as a WeWork member.

Our sprint goal: Convince people that hand-finished, custom frames are worth the extra cost

The goal of the sprint was to enable King & McGaw to sell at least £100K worth of custom picture frames to make it a viable way to grow.

In order to justify having the team of developers taking on a new project, the questions we needed to answer within five days were:

1. Could we convince people it was worth buying a hand-finished custom picture frame over a cheap big-box store frame?
2. Could we design the easiest custom framing experience in the UK?

Who was on the sprint team?

The King & McGaw Sprint team consisted of Nick Boyce as Head of Ecommerce (and the Decider), myself as the designer, Nick Cotton as the developer and Niki as an intern (they had a strict naming policy...). Digital marketer Alannah was the Facilitator and also the interviewer at the end of the week.

As their new UX/UI design contractor, this sprint meant I could get to know the K&M business and eCommerce team too.

How the one-day prototype differed to the product that was released

As a result of brainstorming, interviewing experts and decision making from Monday to Wednesday, we sketched out a new application that would become part of the King & McGaw website. The following section is a comparison of the differences between the prototype we designed and built on the Thursday and the app that was eventually released.

1. 360-degree product view

After exploring other custom framing websites on Tuesday, we found that an interactive 360-degree view of a custom frame offered by a US-based online store was a convincing feature. As we knew the development of something similar would add a significant amount of time and cost, it was vital that we tested this feature to see how target customers responded to it.

2. Product Landing page

The first page of the prototype allowed the user to pick a frame colour under ‘7 Beautiful Frames’ prior to opening the app. This, however, was abandoned as testing found that users tended to explore colours again in the app anyway.

3. Print Measurement page

The main issue testing revealed was that people would rush through the measurements of their print and not take into account the effect of an existing border. This is why we decided to reduce the Measure page to focus on width and height alone with a ‘How do I measure’ link to teach people how correct measurement varies depending on preferences.

4. Frame Colour preference

Another difference was in the way users chose a wood colour. Close up imagery was used in the final product to make it clearer and a grey background with numbered steps guided the flow. Site-wide product side imagery, a banner of unique selling points at the bottom and social sharing buttons were also applied.

5. Frame Style preference

Finally, for the sake clarity, the Frame style changed between circular buttons in the prototype and images in the product.

What we learned: Easy is better than fancy

Our five interviewees didn’t share our enthusiasm for the 360-degree view. As one interviewee put it, “I just want a frame for my print!” which summarises the emphasis we needed to put on an intuitive interface over fancy features that would take a while to build.

Did we answer our sprint questions? Yes to question one, not quite to question two. In hindsight, the question of whether or not target customers fully understood our value proposition was unanswered. Now that the custom framing app has been built, surveys with real customers will determine whether or not they valued the product and service enough to buy from King & McGaw again.

What’s next for the project?

In the video (45 seconds) below, our decider Nick explains how future development of the custom framing application will be undertaken.

What worked/didn’t work about the sprint process?

As you can see in the graphic above, the product we released has a healthy percentage of customers using the app to buy a custom frame and this suggests that there is some evidence to say the sprint process was a success. For a deeper insight, Nick elaborates in the video below (00:39).

Did you make any modifications to the process?

We decided to follow the methods put forward by the good ol’ folks at Google Ventures. However, we did schedule a cold beer or two at the end of each day (or seven beers, three mojitos and two whiskeys for me on Friday — it was the London WeWork Halloween party).

Will your team sprint again?

The third video (00:56) with Nick ties up his thoughts on the Sprint process and how it will feed into King & McGaw’s future.

King & McGaw: Design Sprint For a Better Online Store was originally published in Sprint Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.