Being a member of a multi-disciplinary agile team, I often discuss design proposals with non-designers, which sometimes results in long meetings without a final decision at the end. My entire team is aware of the issue, so we keep experimenting with different feedback strategies. One of the latest we’ve tried out was the Six Thinking Hats method.

In Agile the Six Thinking Hats are usually used for retrospectives. In our case, we used them to analyse and evaluate design proposals.

What is the “Six thinking hats” method?

This method was created by Edward de Bono as a tool for group discussion and individual thinking involving six colored hats. Each hat represents a different type of thinking, which helps to look at the problem from different perspectives.

I like to use this method specifically for design critique sessions, as it keeps the discussion constructive and very structured. For our design feedback session we used a modification of the original method. Instead of using one hat at a time only as recommended by the author, we assigned each role to a team member. Considering the size of our team and the specifics of the feedback, we figured out that this modification works best for our needs.

The hats represent the following roles:

• White hat: Focus on facts.
• Yellow: Optimist. They focus on the “pros” and benefits of given proposal.
• Black: Pessimist. They focus on the “cons”, risks and weaknesses. (We didn’t manage to organise black tags, so we used pink instead :-D )
• Red: User’s Advocate, who expresses feelings and emotions of users associated with presented design solutions.
• Green: Idea Generator, brings alternatives and new suggestions to improve the ideas on the table.
• Blue: Technical feasibility. They focus on implementation and technical details.

I you want to run the Six Thinking Hats workshop with your team, you’ll need:

• Post-its (I use post-its in the same colours as the hats to have visually structured analyses at the end of the session)
• Pencils or pens
• Colourful paper hats (or tags)
• Printed version of the UI that needs feedback
• Team (it can be a team of any size, as one person can wear few hats or few people can wear the same hat)
• Facilitator

So here’s how it goes:

1. One (or more) person is assigned to each role. We had 1 person per role.

2. Explain the method, present the design proposals and give them some time for the review and questions if something is not clear.

3. When I’m facilitating I take the white hat and start with the facts just describing what is given in the project and what I see on the design drafts. I put my points on white post-its (one fact per post-it) and stick them on the wall next to the design. This works as a kind of an ice-breaker, so the next team member feels more comfortable to start talking. When I’m done I invite another role to talk about the design from their perspective. And then the next role, and so on till all aspects are fully covered.

I also set a rule: only 1 person is allowed to talk at the time and nobody is allowed to interrupt. This is very crucial detail to avoid falling into a discussion and keep the session focused.

At the end of our feedback session, the design proposal was analysed from different perspectives, so that we could easily prioritise the issues and plan for design iteration.

I’m constantly looking for different strategies how to organise design feedback sessions in a structured way. If you know other methods, please share your knowledge in the comments. Many thanx!