Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Pedro M. S. Duarte

The secrets beyond feedback

If You are a designer and you are reading this, you probably hate feedback, you hate design reviews or in general terms, all the criticism others do about your work. I like to see feedback as the “boogieman” of the design community or the worst nightmare of those who think design is a piece of art.

Photo by Matheus Ferrero on Unsplash

The good news is, you have been looking into on a wrong angle or you simply can’t deal with other opinions in the right way.

“Design is functionality. Beauty is the last order of what design is.” — Bobby Ghoshal

This is a great argument to change the way how we see feedback. Learning how to get more from each opinion and how can deal with feedback as a successfully key for our professional growth make us improve the quality of our work.

Feedback types

There’s a lot of feedback types; negative and positive critiques, appreciation, providing links to resources, making questions, sharing personal experiences, adding motivational and inspirational feedback, all of those are effective tools for improvement. Shall us focus now on the main ones and how can bring that as an advantage.

1. Motivational and Inspirational

Motivational feedback is, in effect, recognition and so far known the best way to let designers being more inspiring. It fulfils our very human needs to be valued by both — ourselves and others.

2. Sharing personal experiences

First of all this type of interactions are seen as facilitators, it helps raise a relationship of mutual respect between designers and the feedback person. Sharing personal experiences makes the feedback feel more authentic and meaningful, because of that can be easily valued by the designers.

3. Negative criticism

We all deal with some critique on our work, but some of us don’t have the right perception about negative critiques. In most of the cases, negative feedback happen when there are high levels of confidence between the parts, because the critic truly believe it’s the best way to help us to make improvements or increase our performance, or just because the critic is a human being with no respect for the ones who work with — and we can still get the best of them and transform all the negativism into ways to improve the quality of our work.

Feedback defined

The term “feedback” is used to describe all the helpful information or criticism about prior action, behavior or work done, communicated to who can use that information to adjust and improve current and future actions, behaviors or work.

https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/feedback-definition-dictionary-76392526?src=UAr7zYXXkAhcBTjOLDhP9w-1-32

How then can designers get great feedback?

1. Don’t be defensive

This step is simple, but many of us don’t know how to deal with it. Let people set them honest opinion and be open to the process. Listen to them instead of defending. Wait until it’s all done, wait until he loses his own words… then you can argue or not if you think that can push you to do a better work.

2. Reciprocate

Giving feedback can be one of the best ways to improve our own ability to “see”. Being a good critic not only means that we’ll be forced to be more analytical, but at the same time it means we’ll be forced to communicate our own feedback in a way that others can understand… and believe me, being able to quickly articulate our thoughts in a review-situation is a vital skill for any designer.

3. Effective listening

The person providing the feedback needs to know they have been understood (or received) and they need to know that their feedback provides some value. Important fact here is that you need to write all feedback you receive from every person, peer, boss, stakeholder, client or whatever who is giving you feedback and then make a nice and clear spread-sheet and writing all there, then we will be able to quickly understand what’s really missing and what needs to be improved.

Conclusion

Feedback is the best tool for continued learning. So let’s start to get the best from it and use it as a springboard for our growth, becoming better persons, better professionals, creating even better strategies, even better products and designs, improving relationships, and so much more. Continued learning is the key to improving.

Enjoy, hope this can inspire you to have new and innovative ideas and that you can apply them to your day job! Cheers to you and good luck.

About the author

Pedro M. S. Duarte passioned designer and front-end developer from Lisbon, Portugal. Almost 20 years experience in the design field going from editorial to graphic and then to digital, since 2009 has been designing high impact websites for the hotel industry with +100 awards won. Has an observable desire to question and challenge design, trends and technology. Loves diving into usability research, evaluations and testing. Design and develop for multiple devices using responsive design principals, user-focus design and accessibility.

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Designer tips: How to get great feedback was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Designer tips: How to get great feedback

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