Hopefully one of the most important parts of any designer’s work life is critique. They have become second nature but in my experience are never done the same way at any organization, or even inside larger organizations. The role I was in before my current allowed me to see how different design teams facilitate a design critique. The majority were doing what we might call the traditional design critique. What do I mean by this?

Traditional Critique

• Designers, Design Manager, etc gather in a room
• One designer presents their work on a screen
• Others in the room critique the work
• The presenting designer gives context, ask questions, takes notes
• High fives for everyone. ✋

This is extremely simplified but I’m sure you get the gist.

Reminiscing on my past work place and realizing some of the issues we were having in my current role got me thinking, we could improve. Some of the problems we were facing include

• The conference rooms were getting packed
• Not enough time during the critique to get any valuable feedback
• With many people it was easy for the discussion to go off topic
• Not everyone can contribute to the conversation, often only a few individuals would take part, or control the conversation

I am not knocking the traditional critique. It just wasn’t working for the group. So we did some research on what other companies were doing and did some brainstorming. These are some of the alternative critique methods we now use.

Dual Designing (Pair Designing)

Inspired by the agile software development technique, pair programming. Two designers work together at one workstation (or inside one design file and through Zoom). This can be done either in a critique style where one designer presents their work and the other critiques it or, what we found to be more popular, two designers working on the same problem. Debating and critiquing design choices as they were being made.

The Wall Approach

This approach comes from the type of critique you may have experienced in school. The designers will print out their work and put it on a wall and the others in the group have to get out from behind their desks and critique the work. This style is great for getting the discussion moving but one major downfall with this method is its in person nature. One of our designers is in Colorado and another in Los Angeles while we are based in San Francisco. The facilitator would take notes, pictures, etc for the remote folks. We often pointed as many webcams at the walls as we could and brought in some extra microphones. In the end, the experience was not the same for the remote attendees.

The “Hey Who is Free?” Approach

This was the least formal but most popular of the methods we tried. The designer would simply shout out on Slack, “Hey is anyone free to critique?”. Whoever had a moment would either hope on Zoom or come to a desk (or both) and do an ad hoc crit. There were some occasions where no one was free to crit but for the most part it worked well. Some issues we did find with this included problems with context switching and some designers disliked the lack of formality.

What we Noticed

Not all of the approaches mentioned work for every situation or every type of design output that needs critiquing. So it’s best to experiment and find what works best for you and the work.

We aren’t Finished

We are still experimenting with our critique process and will continue to find other methods that work for us. The ones mentioned above worked well and we plan to continue them as we move forward. Although The Wall approach is one we tend to do less often.

Do you have any critique suggestions?

Resources we found useful

Design Critiques at Figma

How to run productive design critiques