A crit on a photo upload feature 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 photo upload live in the client app? Clinicians have been asking for client photos, and the request makes a ton of sense. They want to see who they’re about to meet, especially with new clients. But there’s a wrinkle. Client accounts get created through intake forms, so there’s no traditional account management surface in the app. No editing your name, your pronouns, your email. The photo 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 photo upload 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 photo 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. “I’m really just truly live designing this right now,” she said, 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 photo management, and make the avatar circle itself the tappable affordance instead of repeating an Add Photo 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 takes the photo during a telehealth session, with the client’s permission. Our design lead’s answer came fast. That’s a nonstarter. Client-initiated upload preserves agency, and clinician-initiated capture 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.