When and how to get useful feedback on a piece of work or an idea.
When to get feedback
You'll get the most out of a design feedback session for rough, early work. This might be:
- a first draft of web content
- a draft email or letter
- user journey maps
- wireframing a new online form
No piece of work is too small. Sometimes it's just a conversation about how to approach a difficult conversation with a stakeholder.
Allocate a consistent weekly or fortnightly time that the team can rely on.
Why we have design feedback sessions
Whatever you want to discuss, getting feedback from colleagues makes things better. Feedback sessions should be a place to share and learn with others.
Regular feedback sessions mean:
- we're not stuck in our team silos
- ideas don't exist (or grow) in a vacuum
- we can explore early pieces of work with people in different teams without judgement
- a better design process - everyone will bring a new opinion to what you're solving for
How to run a feedback session
Before a feedback session
Before booking in a session to get feedback on your work, you should:
- decide who to invite - make sure you include people with the expertise you need
- send a pre-meeting message to summarise the topic of the session. Write a sentence or two around the problem you're solving for, what you're hoping to get out of sharing and the amount of time you need
- send the session rules to participants a day or two before the session
Rules for a design feedback session
Talk about the product, not the person
Don’t talk about the person, just the piece of work. You are only there to improve your product – as a team.
Instead of: ‘Your second paragraph is too long and a list. Why didn’t you use bullets?’ (confrontational)
You could say: ‘Do we think bullets might work on page like this?’
You are talking to the team about making a piece of work better – not asking the person why they didn’t do something. Also, you don’t actually know that person didn’t use bullets and it didn’t work.
Be honest, constructive and kind
Good, constructive feedback can be hard. Your feedback session needs to be a safe environment for those talking and those listening.
Questions help more than statements. For example, changing: ‘you always forget to cap that word’ to ‘our style says we cap that word’ gently reminds the author to check.
When you keep that in mind, you end up changing your vocabulary and the way you speak.
No-one needs to defend a position
If you are working together on something as a team, there is no need for anyone to defend anything. You are all working on it and learning together.
During a feedback session
Give a brief introduction to what you're designing for/the problem you're trying to solve.
If you have more than 5 participants, split into breakout rooms if you are meeting remotely, or smaller groups if your session is face to face.
Splitting into smaller groups allows you to cover more topics in less time, makes the room more comfortable for the presenters, and reduces the overall time spent on each topic as there's guaranteed to be a bit less feedback with a smaller crowd.
Nominate someone to take notes. Don’t try to make changes as you’re going. It’s better to concentrate on what people are saying, and to be able to explain any particular design decisions and rationale if you need to challenge any ideas.
After a feedback session
Decide where you're going to make changes to your content based on feedback from the session. If there are conflicting opinions, you are responsible for making the call on which opinion to follow. The most important thing is that your work follows content standards.
