Andy Polaine
Design critique is one of the fundamental aspects of managing quality and increasing quality within a design department. And it comes up quite a lot in coaching because there are a couple of different things that go on that I keep hearing. This video explores the theme of critiquing the work, not the person.
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Transcript
Design critique is one of the fundamental aspects of managing quality and increasing quality within a design department. And it comes up quite a lot in coaching because there are a couple of different things that go on that I keep hearing.
One is a cultural mismatch. In the UK, where I’m from, design crit culture is pretty brutal. It’s well known for it. I think it’s fairly true in Europe, too, where there’s this understanding that we’re critiquing the work, not the person. Now, please, my American friends, tell me I’m wrong about this. One of the things I’ve noticed when that meets American crit culture, that it’s not quite the same. The words or the directness that I think is maybe used in the language from Europe, and it may be sometimes because English is the second language of that person, kind of hits harder to certain American audiences, maybe certainly sort of Californian West Coast audiences. It happens in Europe often. And there’s often a bit of a kind of Eastern Europe or, say, German-Dutch directness compared to some other nationalities.
So that’s one thing. But partly it’s about setting up the structures. I made a video once before about giving feedback where you are creating this safe space, but also this structured space to say, you know, in this space we are going to have this critique. If any of you know Pixar’s famous Brains Trust, it’s exactly that. It’s not about the director. really just going to kind of pull apart the script and rebuild it for the better.
There’s another thing that is counterintuitive when it comes to bringing work to critique.
I think in the last 10 years of product design in particular, where there’s been a lot of work that starts out really with using an existing design system in Figma. So you’re really starting with the kind of polished pieces often, and designers are sort of assembling those pieces into a design, rather than coming up with the stuff from scratch and going from sketch to wireframe to kind of polished work, as we used to, that often people are presenting or bringing quite polished work to a design review or design critique session.
The counterintuitive thing here is that nobody likes their work critiqued, right? It always stings a little bit, even if you’ve given whatever everything I’ve just said, around it’s around the work and not the person, because there’s something of yourself in it. What people often do in response to that is polish work to a higher level than it needs to be, because they want to feel like it’s a done deal. I’ve done everything I possibly can here. And when it comes to critique, my idea is finished. So there is no critique to be had. So I’m not going to get emotionally stung.
The problem is you get more attached to it by that point in time. And so actually, if you do receive critique, then it stings even more. In fact, it’s much better to bring something with slightly rough edges to it, because you’re a bit more relaxed about it. And that’s the counterintuitive thing, that our response to try and avoid the feeling of criticism actually creates a situation where we feel it even worse. You know, as design leaders, part of it is about setting by example.
I just had an interesting coaching session where we realized there was a sort of mirroring of my coach. He was saying this about some of his reports and some of his team. But at the same time, I had this tendency to do it himself when he was presenting work to the kind of larger organization. So, you know, set by example.
But the other thing is to set some ground rules about what is going on in a design review or critique about how it operates, so that you’re not always defaulting to the sort of tacit power structures in that space. You can surface some of those more, those cultural elements or those language things, or the way you go about giving critique, and I still really like Stars and Wishes as a feedback mechanism, which is in the Stars are the highlights, and Wishes are things you wish they were there. Stars and wishes works really well because they’re both positive things and people tend to give more honest feedback and I think there’s also something there about saying well you know I would wish for this thing but that’s also just my opinion rather than this thing’s wrong but building a robust culture of critique is really essential to raising the quality of the work and I think it’s one of the things that’s really, really important for designers to learn early on in their career, because if they become more established and they haven’t really been exposed to that by the time they get more senior, it’s a lot harder for them to let go of that.
I hope that’s helpful. If you’re interested in my coaching practice, you can go to polaine.com/coaching. Otherwise, you’ll find more of these videos here on YouTube.