Two presenters, one silent FigJam board, and the small framing moves that made 10 minutes of written feedback land.
Our Thursday design crit runs silent. The presenter gets a few minutes of context, then a 10-minute timer starts and the room writes feedback onto a FigJam board without talking. The presenter reads along, asks a clarifying question or two, and the next person is up. It’s one of the more efficient hours on my calendar, and this week had two presenters who each did something small and worth copying.
The first brought a trial upsell for a premium insurance feature. Her squad is a 2-person tiger team with a charter to figure out what upsell patterns work and, in her words, permission to run a little wild. She’d already shipped a widget in our new billing hub for practices mid-trial, after customer interviews showed that early-access users didn’t understand what the feature included. The question for crit was the entry point for everyone else: click “see trial details” and then what?
She brought 3 options. A scrolling flyout with expandable sections per feature and a pricing block at the bottom, with the honest caveat that pricing drops further down the page as sections expand. A stepped flyout: value props first, then continue to pricing and an “accept and start my trial” CTA. And a condensed modal. Before the timer started, a peer asked whether the version she’d shown him the day before, a flyout that hands off to a pricing modal, could be on the board too. She added it, told the room not to be biased by his opinion, and 4 options went to the vote.
The fourth option came from someone who’d seen the work a day early. Design crit rewards showing work more than once.
DHH made a version of this point on Lex Fridman’s show recently. What humans are good at, he said, is differential evaluation: give me 3 options and I’ll pick one in a split second, give me 22 and I fall off a cliff. Four options on a board with a 10-minute timer is right in that sweet spot. Twenty-two would have been a different meeting.
The second presenter brought credentialing tasks. A partner’s ops team generates these when a clinician’s payer application needs something: a missing field, or in the case of Medicare, going out into the world to get fingerprinted. Every task carries a title, a description, a due date, and a status he’d bucketed into needs attention or in review. In the current API, tasks aren’t linked to the payer application they belong to, so he designed around that and said so up front rather than letting the room discover the gap.
His proposal was a tabbed flyout hub he’s calling Action Items, on purpose. Our product already has a tangle of task-shaped things: task-like modules on the homepage, actual tasks in the left nav, and now these. Steering clear of the word was a naming decision, and he asked the room to pressure-test it. Then he did the thing I most want to call out. He named exactly what he wanted feedback on, the name, the tab labels, and whether the whole flow belongs in a flyout, and named what he wasn’t asking for: copy, still in flight. Afterward he told us the part he’d been most nervous about, a “badging, numbering and circling apocalypse” of counts and tags and overdue states, and that the nudges on date handling were exactly what he’d hoped for.
Both presenters treated the ask as a design object. She left room on the board for a fourth option. He fenced off the areas that weren’t ready and pointed the room at the ones that were. Ten silent minutes went a long way because the framing did most of the work before the timer started.