A 3-line follow-up post for after design crit, why the most important line is the feedback you decided not to take, and why it belongs in the channel the whole product team reads.
Our Tuesday design crit got canceled this week because nobody signed up. One empty week doesn’t mean much on its own, and it did send me back to a conversation I had the next day with 2 designers I work with, about what happens to feedback once crit is over.
Here’s how the loop usually runs. A designer brings work to the room, a dozen people react, the designer says thank you and goes back to the file. The next time anyone in that room sees the work, it has changed or it hasn’t, and nobody explains which comments moved it and which ones didn’t. If your suggestion didn’t show up in the next version, you can’t tell whether it was weighed and declined or never registered at all.
I said it to them like this: we need to do a good job of sharing back what we heard in crit and what we’re doing about it, and most importantly, what we’re not doing.
Feedback that wasn’t taken looks exactly like feedback that wasn’t heard, until someone says which one it was.
The format we landed on is short enough that nobody has an excuse to skip it:
- The feedback I heard. A few lines, in the words people used, so they can recognize their own comment.
- What I’m doing about it. The changes that are coming, and roughly when.
- What I’m not doing. The suggestions that won’t make it in, each with one sentence of reasoning. Something like, “I heard you, but that goes against a pattern we’ve agreed on, so I’m not going to iterate on it. I want to make sure you felt heard.”
Then a link to the design file for anyone who wants to follow along.
The third line is the one people will want to leave out, because it feels like reopening a disagreement in public. I think it does the opposite. A declined suggestion with a reason attached is a complete answer. The person who offered it knows it landed, knows why it stopped, and has what they need to push back if the reasoning is wrong. A suggestion that disappears gives them nothing, and after a few rounds of that, people stop offering.
Post it where the whole team reads. We’re putting the follow-up in our largest product channel, the one with a few hundred people across product, design and engineering, instead of the design-only channel. The product managers and engineers who sat in crit are the people most likely to be surprised by the next version, and they deserve the same explanation the designers get. It also shows everyone else how design decisions get made, which is visibility the design team rarely gets for free.
Go first. A post like this needs someone to respond to it before anyone else will, so I’ll be the first comment on the first one. If it catches on, it becomes our standard after crit. If it doesn’t, we’ll have learned something about the room for the price of a few short posts.
My hunch is that this changes crit itself, too. When presenters know they’ll report back in public, they come in with sharper questions, because they’ll have to explain what they did with the answers.