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 the entry point into a paid add-on. Her squad is small and has, in her words, permission to run a little wild. She’d already shipped a first version of the details view, after customer interviews showed that people didn’t understand what the add-on included. The question for crit was the entry point for everyone else: click “see details” and then what?
She brought 3 options. A scrolling flyout with expandable sections per feature and the decision at the bottom, with the honest caveat that the decision drops further down the page as sections expand. A stepped flyout: value props first, then continue to the decision and a single 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 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 a set of tasks that get generated outside our product, by an operations team, when something a clinician started needs their attention: a missing field, or an errand they have to run out in the world. Every task carries a title, a description, a due date, and a status he’d bucketed into needs attention or in review. One piece of data he needed wasn’t available yet, 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 with a name that deliberately avoids the word task. Our product already has more than one task-shaped thing, 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 pile-up of badges, counts, 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.