Most Design Feedback Should Be Ignored
- The majority of feedback you get throughout life is pretty poor.
- Designers often receive subjective feedback because design is perceived to be a subjective subject.
- Receiving quality feedback is vital to improving at anything.
The underlying problem with most feedback is: people love to give feedback. It makes us feel smart when we tell someone how they should do something. The hard part is spotting the difference between someone who wants to look smart and someone who wants to help. The former is using up your time and damaging the design process; the later is the most valuable person in your professional life and worth their weight in gold. You gotta spot the difference.
This applies to life as well as work, the person who is trying to look smart is using up more than your time. It’s confidence theft. One person is claiming to have a better solution than the person who has experience working on the problem. So vast is their skill, and so limited is yours, surely you must need their advice.
Unsolicited advice is a form of bullying
Take the example of a friend saying they think you should go vegan because of the health benefits. You’re fully aware how much you value eating certain foods over your health or vice-versa. All they can tell you is that veganism is (supposedly) healthy, as soon as they say you should go vegan they’re making a bold claim. They’re claiming they can weight up all the aspects of your life and say what’s best for you better than you could. That’s either the second coming of Jesus, or it’s delusional. Acting delusional is great fun, but not a good idea to listen to.
Another friend comes over to your desk to tell you how you should change all the icons because thin lines are so IOS9. It’s 3 pm, and you’re stuck for ideas, so you listen, despite the fact that you’ve been doing this for 15 years, you interviewed all the users, did tests, and you’re aware how they work with the other 25 screens. Sometimes we take this kind of advice because it’s said with enough confidence or just because we’re tired.
The person stood at your desk saying you have to change the icons is bullying, but it’s because they’re insecure. Make sure you listen and thank them, their ego needs the boost. It’s not a particularly strong form of bullying but the last thing you want to do is take unsolicited advice seriously. I’m not saying take it with a pinch of salt. I’m saying 100% ignore it, it’s about them and not about work. Designers big monitors with colourful picture on are easy picking for bullying advice givers so maybe you’re fed up with it. Why not explain how they can A/B test designs with the two kinds of icons, they won’t do it in a million years and you’ll probably never get unsolicited advice from them again!
I’m sure there are some lovely vegans out there by the way. I just never seem to meet them. More than likely, the non-narcissistic vegans aren’t telling everyone about their diet. Which brings me to point two:
Most noise is from people who haven’t thought it through yet
Your best feedback will come from the person who isn’t giving it to you! (Says the guy who’s writing his tips down in a blog post). The ones who instantly start making noise haven’t even thought about it yet.
I’m sure the whole introvert/extrovert idea is as dead as the Myers-Briggs test itself, but it seems that we do think with our heads or our mouths first depending on the situation. When it comes to work, most people seem to go for mouth first. You get more acknowledgement, respect and you look smarter. Unfortunately, you’re acting stupider when you do. In some cases, the cost of looking smart is acting stupid. But the ones who are thinking first aren’t the ones you’re hearing. How could you? For most people design skills hide in some dark area of their mind labelled “don’t know what you don’t know”. Ask someone what you think of some javascript and they can either help or not because at worst they don’t know how to code and know they don’t know how to code. Many people with no experience in design don’t know they don’t know how to design. Often thinking that because they know if they ‘like’ it or not they can throw some feedback out there, making a pretty bad noise to signal ratio when getting design feedback.
Some peoples feedback is always better than others, obviously. Some people are always positive or always negative making their feedback always useless. We all think differently than we did yesterday or we will tomorrow. So the person with the best feedback today might not give good feedback tomorrow. Or the person who gave great feedback on one topic maybe can’t on something else. The people we work with suffer from all the same biases that our customers do; luckily we’re designers, we’re experts at working with these biases.
You wouldn’t dream of making usability changes to a design if you didn’t have a whole lot of confidence in the usability research. So why would you accept someone’s feedback if you weren’t confident they understand the problem.
Feedback without clarification is noise
When someone asks a question that I don’t know the answer to, I believe the best answer is “I don’t know”. Not everyone believes that but I think it shows confidence, intelligence and respect for the person I’m talking to. Some people think it takes skill to answer a question they don’t know the answer to; I think thats idiotic, disrespectful and a waste of everyone’s time. I thought I was unique in my thinking. Then I learned Jared Spool used to wear a t-shirt with “It depends” written on it because of how many questions he had to answer with “It depends” per day. A simple rule of thumb to make sure you’re ignoring the right feedback, did the person giving feedback take the time to understand what they’re providing feedback on? If they haven’t got clarity on the problem, the only feedback they can give is “I don’t know” or “It depends”.
A slightly more design specific rule: are they giving feedback on the solution or on the process that got to the solution. The person who want’s to solve your problems for you could be an advice bully. However experienced they are, they can’t solve the problem better than you, certainly not on the spot. But if they have more experience solving similar problems, they probably know a better process than you to get a better solution.
I didn’t paint a nice picture of design feedback I know; I’m just going to make it slightly worse before I make it better. All of these issues are our responsibility to make it better. We have to ignore most people while being respectful and thanking them. We have to actively seek out feedback from the very people who aren’t giving it to us when we are tired of hearing feedback. We have to ensure we frame the problem and explain the process we used to get to the solution. We need to be at least slightly sceptical of every response.
Now here is the positive bit: hardly anyone will do this, and even less will do it well. As a designer you’re halfway there, you research with customers and users, you need to know what to ignore and what to listen to. You need to know who to ask and what to ask. If we actively try and improve how we get feedback, we’ll grow faster than anyone else. Most importantly, it’s a transferable skill that you can take home with you. Good luck out there.
If you want to give feedback
I’d like feedback on how clearly I articulated my points, did you find it clear and easy to follow? I’m not great at articulating my thoughts, which is why I’m developing a writing habit, so I specifically want to know if the article was clear. I’d also like feedback on how scary my drawings are!
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