Nicole Coumes Welcome, good morning. Nicole Coumes Good afternoon. Good evening, depending on what time you are watching this talk. Today I am going to be speaking about design critiques, what they are, why they're important, and how to make them occur at your organization. Nicole Coumes Hopefully, you have clicked on the right webinar. If not, I hope you stay a little bit longer to learn more about how to give productive feedback and how to start really a culture of feedback at your organization. A little bit about me before we get started. My name is Nicole Coumes. I'm a user experience designer at Forum One. We work with mission driven organizations such as nonprofits, foundations, government entities, and I am based out of Washington DC. I'm also a first time speaker at IAC. Woohoo. I'm a under 30 millennial. So what that means is I'm going to communicate a lot through internet culture during my presentation. So you have been warned. But in all seriousness, why I'm here today talking to you about critiques is because I have started two different ongoing critique series at my current company, as well as previously IBM. It's probably worth saying at this point in the presentation that anything I'm sharing is really kind of my experience and my reflection of what I've done and created rather than being a spokesperson for these organizations. So just putting that disclaimer out there. Nicole Coumes So let's get started. I want you to take a minute and reflect back to your first professional or academic experience receiving feedback on your design work. So what was your first critique experience like? For me, my first experience with critiques, or at least the the one that sticks out the most to me, it started all with a red dot. I was in my typography one class at the Hartford art school. And we had just done an exercise on kerning and leading. And we had to take a step back from our work and look at it objectively. In this case, how this works is kind of, picture a room and we're all putting our pieces of paper on the wall. Yeah. And we are told to circulate around the room, we were given these red dots. And what we were supposed to do with the red dots is put them next to anything we saw that was problematic in the work. So any sort of issues we saw stick a red.on it. And so what this look like is maybe you had one red dot kind of like here. Or maybe you had two not so bad, some room for improvement there. But you could also have something that looks a little bit like chickenpox, so maybe you have a cluster of red dots on your work and in how this continued In the classroom, as you know, once everybody placed their dots, we had a conversation, why the dots for left there, and what sort of areas of improvement there was for the presenter. This may seem really brutal, like a really brutal introduction to create the critique and feedback in a more professional setting, but not really, I think overall, the value at least that I found was, you know, having dots by your work doesn't mean you're a bad designer hardest, but really, work doesn't become magically good without iteration and feedback. This was a really valuable lesson that was taught to me through this, these read thoughts. Over time, my classmates we asked each other more and more for work, critique on our work Outside of these kind of formal settings that our professors had set up for, for us, and it was a really powerful and bonding experience. Nicole Coumes When I think about what this taught me to is really a critiques are about a few things. So they're about improving craft and soft skills, your hard skills and your soft skills. Talking about your work can be just as important as making the work and critiques kind of force us into a place where we're talking about our work really objectively, and hopefully in a few words. Unexpectedly, it also builds community so the sense of belonging and connectedness gained was really powerful. So I was beginning to build my community with other designers around talking about work as our foundation there was a lot of sort of sharing vulnerability and and then maybe even less intuitively, a mitigating risk is actually a very important part of critiques are getting feedback on your work. So realizing something you're making, whether it's not meeting the prompt or not meeting that user needs, especially in the real world on unintended consequences can happen really quickly when you're not introducing others into your work, whether it's peer to peer or getting feedback outside of your, your professional network, right? testing with users. So I diversity of opinion is really critical for making good work. And so, critiques are just one piece of that puzzle. Nicole Coumes So, critiques and any sort of one thing isn't going to make all of your, your skills or dimensions of you as a creative professional instantly good. But I think critiques are really helpful when you're thinking about leveling yourself up. So we have different skills, different levels within our skill set of where we're at. And so critiques will help us level up as a team. So this is kind of a portrait of me, maybe post grad, right? Like I have some strengths, you know, but, but I really need to improve in a lot of different areas. So feedback is good. Okay, my work is done. No, I'm just kidding. Really, you know, you probably coming to this talk already assumed feedback is good. And so this is not really the focus of the presentation. It's more how to, how to talk about feedback and and how to receive that. Nicole Coumes So why now? So why is this meaningful? Now? Why do we care? Really why this is important? It's comes down to a number of different things. So the first one, more people than ever are becoming designers, you may have observed this yourself, and why I think this is relevant is you got a little bit of background about my experience, I went to an art school, I had a very expensive, maybe too expensive education about how to talk about art, and how to talk about design in a constructive and objective manner that kind of removed egos. But not everyone has that same background, and not all education is uniform. different professions have different mechanisms of feedback, and some may be less so than others. And so we're thinking about all these new emerging designers with different professional backgrounds, different education backgrounds, it's really important that we have guidelines around how to talk about our work and how to build a vocabulary. Because there's a lot of different folks into the mix at this point. And this isn't going away, right? So we know at least in the near term future that designers and user experience designers are going to be highly in demand. So we've we really need to as a field figure out how we're introducing others to our work. So we talked about a little bit of mitigated consequences, right. And so our work doesn't live in a vacuum. Nicole Coumes Yeah, these headlines. They're happening all the time. Right. I just took a snapshot of, of some that were in recent memory. But this is not good, right. And I think a common theme that I see at least is there was probably not sufficient feedback from others that was taken into the mix when some of these solutions are being created. And so the absence of feedback, and especially, you know, external feedback, like usability testing, that sort of thing. It's really ramp it and design attack. And so we need to address this head on. Nicole Coumes Okay, This one again, we we already begun to talk about this a little bit more. But when you're thinking about your community, your company or maybe more broadly, critiques can really be a big part of that. And I think we're learning more and more with the current pandemic about why relationship building and the sense of belonging connectedness within the workplace is actually really important and probably underrated. So this is becoming more important than ever. This is a screenshot from a recent critique session we had, and lots of smiling faces there. But you know, critiques do provide additional space time on and they they can help with the connectedness piece, aside from being great opportunities to improve our skills. Nicole Coumes And then kind of last but not least, knowing how to give and receive feedback outside of design more broadly speaking, is a really good skill. And there's a lot of different forms of feedback. And of course, we only have a limited amount of time to talk together today. So we are not going to talk about all these different ways to get feedback to find critique Just one piece of that puzzle. And so I would encourage you when you're thinking about starting a critique series, to also reflect with your leadership about all the different ways your designers and your your teams are getting feedback or not getting feedback, and how you can improve that by introducing other different ways. critiques can really help plant a seed, but they're not the only piece. So the challenge, why we wouldn't be here if if this was easy or without challenges, or if everyone was doing it really well. So let's talk about those barriers. Nicole Coumes Here goes, yes, this this is a big thing, right? So being sensitive or not thinking you need feedback. Of course, if you're not giving feedback and a constructive way, it can be perfect. But it should not be. So training or lack of training, which I think is part of that, right. So by having training or education around how to give feedback and how to receive feedback, it can help prevent getting unhelpful feedback. So very important. resources. So the idea that critiques are expensive, or are worth the ROI, and this is something you need to address head on within your organization. And we'll talk a little bit about that more shortly. Nicole Coumes This is a fun example of unhelpful critique of work that you probably have experienced or at least seen secondhand. This kind of happens right when we don't have lack if we don't have training So, this can be avoided. So unhelpful feedback, no good, really frustrating. No feedback, maybe even worse, not so good. Nicole Coumes So let's get started How can this work at your organization? Nicole Coumes Over time I have discovered there's about five stages or steps, that every critique or successful critique needs, no matter what sort of format it is or what organization it is, it looks something like this. Generally, you have decide prepare, practice, reflect and iterate. Step one, deciding and why this is a step is we talked about a barrier is the perception that critiques can be very resource intensive, and so But you need to tackle that. And by having a conversation with your organization around how you can measure success and what the benefit of critiques are, I think is very critical for setting yourself up for success. And perhaps you already have the buy in and so the conversation is more focused on measurement and just making sure you're progressing and that's okay too. But when you're thinking about things to measure, things that are helpful dimensions, I think are maybe creative confidence, your your speaking or soft skills, the the craft, so quality of work, but you could also measure kind of staff morale in general around getting feedback and being connected to their community. So there's a lot of different things that you can think about measuring whether you're sending out a survey or maybe have other evaluation methods or your organization. Step two, prepare. So another really critical step. So you've already had a conversation with your leadership, you know what you're going to do for these critique series. Now you need to kind of set logistics at the planning. So, here, you want to make sure you're gathering your team, everyone that's going to participate in the critiques, and creating rules together around how this is going to work. So rules can look anything like we want to treat, all with fairness and kindness. So maybe you're creating a code of conduct of some sorts. You could be setting logistics around allowing, you know, presenters only one to two minutes to talk about their work. So you could be cognizant of time. But you will need to decide what are the size of the groups you're working in their cadence weekly, daily, monthly, hopefully not quarterly or yearly. Hopefully it's a little more often In that timing, so how long have a session you're going to have? And then who is in the groups? Is it just designers if the product or not? I'm in really figuring that out and having an open conversation with your stuff? Practice. Okay, so this is the meat of what we were talking about. Right. And so timeboxing presenters, that's a really important piece to think about, especially when you're kind of in the prepare stage. Making sure you're creating a safe space really important, encouraging designers to show work early and at different stages. I also want to add, you know, we're talking about user experience design. And that doesn't always that's not always UI, right. So have your team review things like interview scripts, or troubleshoot the logistics of usability tasks. Use the time to brainstorm about an upcoming workshop, you know, things don't have to be kind of screened based or, or, you know interfaced base to get valuable feedback. So I really encourage you to think about this time creatively. Nicole Coumes And then another thing that I find helpful is designating a facilitator or some sort of leader, which you can rotate, and having them keep track of time, maybe notes, and also kind of facilitate the conversation, especially as you're just kicking off the critique series. I've found at least for kicking off two different series that first things are going to feel a little awkward, especially if you don't have that culture of talking about work frequently with each other. So the facilitators there to kind of be the the conversation lubricates to make sure everything's kind of going, going well and protecting that, that safe space to talk about work. Nicole Coumes And another thing to think about too is it's always valuable to bring work because you're also improving your ability to explain work as much as the work itself. So you may be thinking, Wait, Nicole, you didn't talk about how feedback works, how to give it, what good feedback looks like. So don't worry, we're gonna go a little bit on a tangent to talk about that before I get to steps four and five. So let's talk about giving feedback and what that looks like. Nicole Coumes So feedback should really be these things right? So being kind, but also very candid and specific with feedback. affirming what works. So your presenter hopefully, it's, it's telling you what specifically they need to be back on and so part of that Maybe talking about things that they don't need to improve. And then really using that time to dig into those specific areas they need help on being data driven. So what I mean by data driven is our design work should always be tying back to key goals, whether they're business or user goals. They should also be meeting different user or audience needs. And so there's there's a lot of opportunities to kind of steer the conversation around making sure you're referencing analytics to maybe settle an argument or settle a dispute within the conversation or asking the presenter on you said, the goal is x. Can you tell me more about how you're accomplishing that just making sure about the work again, is more sort of objective rather than something active with your feedback. Yeah, so you may been taught at some point, something about the compliment sandwich, right? So I'm not a fan. I'm being kind does not mean bearing harsh, or even constructive comments next to compliments. It really cheapens the feedback that you're giving to the presenter when you're trying to shield their ego. It's more important for us to taking, taking out the ego. And again, I feel like a lot of this can be addressed with ongoing training at your organization, a lot of expectation setting in good behavior you're modeling. So, you know, the compliment sandwich is really to protect the ego and this isn't helpful or relevant, really anymore. Focus on describing what's working and what's not working. And then This doesn't really become a model you need to follow if you're doing that. Some examples of different types of feedback or you know, sample dialogues that I think are nice. So this is an example of maybe trying to be a little more data driven. So I'm asking someone about their goals. Maybe they specified whether the work is meeting that prompt or not. Nicole Coumes Always free something as a question, but also being direct. So what is the color contrast ratio, the text is hard to read. So, you know, always creating exploration i think is fine for giving good feedback. And, you know, you could also offer a suggestion on this is maybe a reaction to something that's more user research based opposed to a interface. And, and these are, you know, just a few small examples, but really, you know, making sure you are being responsible to the presenter, and giving them feedback that is actionable and is helpful in what they're asking for is the most important thing to remember. Okay, so you've been practicing for a little while, um, the next step is reflect. So just like our design work that takes reflection and iteration, so does design operations, which may be more or less surprising to some of you. And I like to think about this, this step or phase as crit, the crit, which is really making sure you're asking feedback on the process. And you can do this quarterly or monthly. I've typically done it more on a quarterly basis and making sure you're measuring Progress or feedback through formal or informal needs. So if you did benchmarking at the beginning of your critique series, maybe doing a follow up survey to see how folks are feeling about the critique series. And so iteration I kind of gave this step away a little bit. So nothing is ever perfect on the first go, and you will be tinkering with the critique over and over again. So again, it's not important to be perfect. Nicole Coumes Okay, so you may be thinking, could this really work for my team? Not all teams look the same. They're different sizes, there's different types of businesses. So I want to be transparent about the work that I did and observed at two different companies and they may still not be a perfect Example or reflection of your company. But I really do think by following kind of the five steps that I outlined that you can have a successful critique series, and making sure you're adapting to your team. So a really quick summary of what things I think are relevant to mention about these two organizations. I'll first talk about IBM, which was kind of my first experience trying to kick off a critique series at a company. In that case, we had kind of a smaller team overall, but a more diverse makeup of folks, designers, product managers, digital strategist, front end developers, we were mostly co located. And I'm calling this kind of more scrappy because I think you will see that things were very informal And when we were putting things together, but it worked for that group of people. For one, my current company, we are still doing critiques right now on so I'm sure they'll even more lessons learned. But this will be a larger kind of sample of folks. I'm broken into multiple groups. And and we are all distributed. So everything has been fully remote even before the pandemic. That was just the way our organization is structured. Not that many of us are in the same office. So that will be another thing to keep in mind as I'm talking. Nicole Coumes Okay, let's dig in. So decide what this look like at IBM is we had a very new, largely junior team of designers that were felt kind of isolated on their different projects. It was interesting expressed and one of our sort of all all hands team's meanings that folks were really struggling getting feedback on their work. And especially from other designers. There were plenty of other different people getting them feedback, but not fellow designers. So what was decided is largely, you know, let's do this thing. So I volunteered to create a series. And I kind of just set things up myself. There wasn't a lot of prior approval we needed and we just kind of ran with that. Which leads me very quickly to prepare. So we use tools that the team were was already very used to using. So we had kind of an automated slack bot that reminded people 15 minutes before we started, that we were doing a daily series, we had calendar blocks for people to use and reference And there were times also we kind of went around the room, like I said, we were we were mostly in the same location. And so we would just kind of gather people to space an office where we could have a conversation. This was kind of a comments you can moto. These weren't required or mandatory for stuff. It was more, you know, use this as you need. And it was a can to kind of a stand up, sort of setup where we were having the daily meetings, but if nobody had anything that day to talk about, then we would just skip that day. But we always had that time set up for ourselves. Practice so I think I already mentioned this, that we had a diverse group of folks that were coming each day not just designers and things were largely in person. In this case, we did think largely in person, quarterly retrospectives to figure out how we could be better. Some of the feedback that stands out in my memory was we had initially a daily series, but we decided to do a little less often. And to put the responsibility more on the designers that needed feedback to ask or more sort of ad hoc sessions. And we had maybe one or two a week that were more formal that everyone attended. We also moved to a more remote friendly setup. So remote feedback sessions became the norm and if anyone wanted something in person that became you know, more the The outlier, right, so we were shifting to everything on video conferencing. And previously we weren't doing that. Right. And so we were making tweets tweaks constantly. we rotated kind of facilitator. So I was kind of the master facilitator for the first quarter or two, but that comp passed on in terms of responsibility. Nicole Coumes Regrettably, we to not come up with a lot of different things we were measuring, because things were so sort of ad hoc and scrappy. So these were a couple things that that I noted. So we, in this case, it was really important the frequency this is not the case for all organizations, but having more conversations was important success indicator and so we were able to begin to accomplish that and then more and more Anecdotally there was a lot more conversations outside of that time around design work that weren't previously happening. So people were breaking down their silos and creating that that sense of community more and more often. Nicole Coumes For forum one, we had a meeting of design leadership about a year ago to establish a design critique series and as part of that, we decided to put out a five questions survey for benchmarking and measurement. And I getting a little ahead of myself we we've been running that survey each quarter to see kind of the the feedback and what improvements we've been making. So critique series here are mandatory. We break our team up into small groups. Initially, our groups were just designers the first quarter or so. And then we introduced front end developers, and then later kind of more of our brand strategists, which are still designers, but they weren't initially part of our first kickoff. So the group's have changed over time. So largely design and front end developer focused or conversations. Something we've done over time is when you don't have work to show, really, we've been asking folks to instead, bring inspiration, things like that. And that's been really helpful for keeping the dialogue continue. And then we do, as I mentioned, kind of quarterly survey follow up to monitor our progress and making tweaks throughout our groups. Also I should have mentioned they rotate. So where we're working with different folks, each quarter. A couple of results I can share with you all is we've had about a 25% increase of different team members asking for feedback on a more frequent basis. So that is something we were interested in making sure happens. And I should say also outside of the sort of critique setting. And then also another piece we were really interested in changing as work being shown earlier stages. So what was happening previously is a lot of times the work being shared was really far down the line in terms of fidelity. And so we wanted to, to make sure designers for looping in more feedback earlier Through these sort of two series, there's been additional best practices that at least have been helpful and things that I think should be happening if you're starting your own critique series. So really, the the diversity and a range of participants has been really lovely and both. In both cases, the quality of feedback, the different types of feedback has been really incredible. So if you can extend your critique crew, beyond designers, at least, you know, after maybe you pilot initial series, I think that can be fantastic. Establishing a code of conduct that has been really wonderful to kind of have everyone on the same page. And then especially now having very remote friendly logistics, so do everything on zoom or WebEx or whatever service you're using. There's a lot of different tools You can use to get feedback on the design, whether it's commenting and envision or maybe your, your commenting and the WebEx or the Zoom chat. A lot of these tools now have drawing capabilities too. So it doesn't have to just be conversational. It's easier than ever to get feedback remotely. Nicole Coumes You have achieved design Nirvana, right? So this is the idea that me as a presenter, I should be telling you okay, I solved it. Everything's amazing. That is disingenuous, right? SI couldn't resist putting this in here, right hard to swallow pills. No one at IAC20 has the answer. And this could not be more true for what I want to convey to you. So you're going to have challenges Through this critique series, we had challenges. And I wanted to share those with you, because I think it's really important to say, no one quite has the answer. But I think, you know, there are some things that hopefully you can learn from my mistakes or my challenges. So some things that we are still figuring out that form one, at least, is not having work, maybe to show every week. And so to get more creative about how we're using this time, I've been important. The series are mandatory, but we really struggle with scheduling at forum one. So making sure these don't get booked over. So we have to work with our other colleagues to make sure this time is preserved. And I think I too, wanted to leave you with this right that having a productive dialogue is more important than perfection. And this is so true, right? It's all about Kind of the process and the journey and the fact that we are doing this thing together to make sure you know that we're hitting on improving craft and our soft skills, we're building an entity and mitigating risk. And this can be messy. But these things are so valuable that it's really worth the 30 challenges that you're, you'll experience. Nicole Coumes So in summary, no feedback, no good, right? No unhelpful feedback, no good. feedback. pretty great. And what happens hopefully over time, right, so we get back to this idea of leveling up that it's not about perfection, but it's about progress. And so your team is maybe starting out more like this, but hopefully, you know, they are improving and this is another opportunity for them to improve resources. So I guess kind of some housekeeping to end with that hopefully you will follow me on twitter at Coumes design. I will be tweeting out later today, code of conduct and feedback guidelines that you have developed that form one that hopefully you can find helpful and download for yourself. I also should note that we are doing a q&a session later today at 4pm. And so I look forward to talking to you all and learning more about your challenges with feedback. So, I will see you then and until then, go forth and begin critique Transcribed by https://otter.ai