A crit on a small client-facing setting ended with a live redesign built from a pattern the product already owned. How the room got there, and what it says about running crit well.
Our mobile design lead brought a deceptively simple question to our first of two weekly design crits: where should a single client-managed setting live in the client app? The request behind it makes a ton of sense. But there’s a wrinkle. Clients don’t manage much about themselves in the app, so there’s no traditional account management surface to put it in. This would be the only attribute a client manages, which means there’s no obvious home for it.
The designer came prepared with 3 options: tuck it into the menu, add a new tab listing every profile on the account, or put profile management right in the dashboard’s profile switcher. Then the room went to work, and honestly, this was crit at its best.
One designer made the first principled cut. Adding a new nav item for what is essentially a single action felt disproportionate to him, and he’s right: nav weight should match the scope of what lives behind it, and a single setting doesn’t earn a tab. Another caught the spatial problem with the switcher option as originally drawn. Tapping something at the top of the screen and having a sheet appear at the bottom feels removed from where you took the action. Small observation, big consequence.
And then one of our most senior designers did the thing I love most in a crit. She started sketching while the rest of us were still talking. She said as much, that she was live designing it right then, and she was. Her move: keep the push-the-dashboard-down expand pattern we already own, let the expanded state handle both profile switching and the new setting, and make the profile itself the tappable affordance instead of adding a separate call to action. No new pattern, no bottom sheet, no new nav item.
The product already had the answer. It just needed someone in the room to extend it.
A shared account with 2 profiles and no clear entry point became the stress test. Rather than contorting the general pattern to handle it, the room agreed on an exception step that simply asks which profile you want to update. Edge cases sometimes deserve an honest exception more than an elegant generalization.
One more moment worth calling out. Someone floated a lower-friction path: the clinician sets it on the client’s behalf during a session, with the client’s permission. Our design lead’s answer came fast. That’s a nonstarter. Client-initiated preserves agency, and clinician-initiated crosses a consent line, permission dialog or not. In a product serving therapy clients, that line matters more than any adoption number.
Our beloved designer turned the crit around in a day. When they walked me through the updated designs the next afternoon, my honest reaction was that they looked night and day different. That’s the whole promise of crit (and why I keep protecting that hour on everyone’s calendar): a good room can compress a week of solo iteration into 40 minutes.
The teachable part
A good crit room argues from principle, catches spatial dissonance, and extends patterns the product already owns. Sometimes the answer gets designed live, in the room, in 40 minutes.