Design Reviews

The quintessential design “squiggle”. It portrays the design process as a journey of researching, uncovering insights, generating creative concepts, iteration of prototypes and eventually concluding in one single designed solution. Design reviews play a large role in progressing designs from messiness and uncertainty to focus and clarity.

The nature of design reviews

Design reviews are an essential ritual of healthy and high-performing design teams. I am a firm believer that great design is not created in silos, but rather in highly collaborative environments. By nature, design reviews bring people together and create a rich forum for feedback, that when done well, can make you feel motivated, encouraged, creative, and empowered!  

As designers we’re asked to put our work on display for others to pick apart, and this can sometimes make us feel quite vulnerable. There’s something to be said about semantics: design review vs design critique. The mental model for reviews are to evaluate, not criticize, work that is being presented. The word “critique” usually carries a negative connotation and can cause a designer to be defensive.

Apart from evaluating designs, the primary purpose of design reviews are to identify issues before committing to further work. It’s a way to de-risk our solutions before they reach our customers’ hands. This is especially important for start-ups, where often the priority is speed over quality, and the mantra of “fail fast and learn fast” can pressure designers to take shortcuts. 

In practice, design reviews are hard!

From receiving feedback that is too prescriptive, to jumping straight to mocks without setting context, to designing by committee, there are many traps to avoid on your way to running a smooth, efficient, and effective design review. Reviews are only one piece of the puzzle towards unlocking “good design”. As a design leader, I have the responsibility to evaluate the quality of my team’s design output, identify gaps, and enable structure or process to raise the quality of our design.

Let’s start by tackling the goals of design reviews.

Goals of design reviews

Before the mechanics of how to run a review, it’s important to align and set the context for the “why”. Why are we so obsessed with design reviews, and what are the outcomes we’re striving for?

  • Avoid design vacuums: Design is not a solo activity, you don’t have all the answers, and you will miss things by working alone.

  • Unblock problems: Feeling stuck? Getting others involved can help you think through a problem out loud and find a solution through the noise.

  • Encourage consistency: Apply shared patterns and principles from your design system, challenge existing patterns, and develop new patterns where needed.

  • Elevate quality: Challenge each other to raise the bar for visual design, interaction design, animation, copywriting, and overall direction.

  • Encourage iteration: Don’t fall in love with your first idea. Design is as much about exploration as it is about refinement.

  • Build empathy: Spend time together to better understand each other’s points of view, motivations, frustrations, and build out a shared capacity to take feedback.

  • Teach others: We can all get better in our craft. Design reviews enable us to share what techniques or methodologies worked in the past and how we can apply those across different problem spaces.

How to run successful design reviews

With these goals in mind, we can start decomposing the mechanics of design reviews and start piecing together best practices. We want to feel excited and motivated to attend reviews, not discouraged or panicked about being in the room. 

Invite the right people, and keep it to a maximum

The sweet-spot for number of people in a design review is 4-6. At this size, everyone in the room feels like an active contributor and can find enough air time between all the speakers. If you go beyond 6 contributors, you face the risk of people staying silent and therefore not providing any valuable feedback to you as a designer. Of course, you can organize much larger reviews, but this will likely take the shape of a silent critique where you’re optimizing for mass volume of feedback in an async fashion.

Align on the problem ahead of the design review

This is a critical step! I’ve been in too many reviews where the question “Why are we doing this?” pops up and the designer is caught like a deer in the headlights. The review is not the place to debate or commit to the problem, but rather to evaluate solutions for an agreed upon problem. The designer, product manager, and other related stakeholders need to align on the problem in separate roadmapping sessions.

Assign a facilitator and note-taker

If you’re the designer presenting, your attention will be squarely focused on narrating your design solution, explaining your design rationale, and asking questions. That’s why it’s a good practice to have someone else facilitate the review and take notes. The facilitator’s main jobs are to keep the review on-topic and document the feedback being presented.

Before the review

Set the context at the start

Before showing any wireframes or mockups, you must explain the “why” of the project. By clearly stating the background, business and user problems, supporting metrics and research, and where you are in the process, you first job as a designer is to align everyone in the room. Providing context upfront can prevent the review from getting derailed or sabotaged into a different direction.

I created a simple Figma template that designers attach to every project and voice-over in the first 5 minutes of the review.

During the review

 

Present multiple solutions and focus on the rationale

It’s easy to fall in love with your solution and only present one concept in the review. You probably have that Figma artboard called “Rough work”, where you mocked up ten different ways to show user notifications. You need to show that rough work and explain why you chose one concept over another in order to build trust and win points with your audience. Presenting multiple solutions to a problem helps you steer the discussion into shared problem solving, as opposed to defending one particular direction. As a rule of thumb, I encourage my design team to present at least 3 concepts in the early stages of a project.

Give open-ended, candid feedback

When conducting customer interviews, it’s accepted best practice to ask open-ended questions. The same is true for design reviews. Participants should phrase their feedback by starting with a “What, How, Why, Have you, Would you”. For example, instead of saying “This button doesn’t have enough contrast”, you can ask “Have you tried different button treatments?” or “Does this button meet our accessibility guidelines?”. This type of feedback is non-threatening and it empowers the designer to come up with solutions by themselves. It’s also important make reviews a space where it’s OK to be direct, even if the commentary is not “nice”. Designs that are “fine” are the death of design quality.

Write down the feedback visibly

In a 30-minute review, it’s not uncommon to receive dozens of different points of feedback. It’s a lot to keep track of! The facilitator should annotate the feedback to the design via a sticky note or a digital comment. By writing down the feedback, the presenter can easily recall what was said, and it helps others feel heard.

Align on direction and feedback, but don’t make rash decisions

The goal of the review should be to move the design forward, but in a directional way, not in a firm way. It’s ultimately the designer’s job to take all the feedback in, document it, tinker with it, reason about it, and then make the call on how to advance the designs. If decisions are made in the review, then you’re likely designing by committee. See next point.

Don’t design by committee

If you find yourself taking a poll in the room for every decision you make, you’re likely doing it wrong. Two things can be a source for this:

  • You don’t feel confident in the work to move it forward. Perhaps you’re very early in the project lifecycle and are worried about making a decision. Go back to the project context and problems you’re solving for, and make sure you can relate the design back to the intended outcomes.

  • There’s a culture problem. If your boss or your boss’ boss is lurking and wants a vote in every decision, you’re likely a victim of a top-down culture that prevents you from taking ownership. Address this heads-on, and if you don’t feel heard, it’s likely time to move on.

Make next steps clear and continue the process

Once the review wraps up, your work has just begun. Your stakeholders will be eagerly waiting to see the next version of the design and see if their feedback has been incorporated. Communicate in advance the next scheduled review, and set the right expectations about the next version. Design reviews are stepping stones in an iterative process.

Keep a regular review schedule

I’m a big believer of “more is more” when it comes to the frequency of design reviews. The more time designers spend together, the more opportunities to push for more explorations, make better reasoning for decisions, pay more attention to detail, and take on more ambitious ideas. At Properly, I set up the design team with three design review slots per week, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, for 30 mins. This fit well for a team our size, but this can easily scale to daily reviews for larger teams.

Address the big rocks, then the small rocks, then the sand

It’s tempting to leave the design review and immediately start to tackle the surface layer feedback. Replace the icon, shorten the copy, make this title bold, adjust the column widths. These quick improvements make you feel like you’re making immediate progress. But you can fall in the trap of obsessing over the minutiae and forgetting about the more impactful changes. I recommend to tackle the large, hairy, confusing parts of the design feedback first. “Should we reduce the number of steps in the onboarding flow? Has this grouping of navigation items been user tested? Has content design been informed yet about this page content?” Focus on unblocking the big problems first, then the sand in between.

Optimize for impact, not for “make everyone happy”

If you find yourself chasing down every Figma comment and are faced with a cross-roads between two different design directions, try to make the decision yourself and move forward, while providing your stakeholders with your rationale. If you’re optimizing for making everyone happy, you will likely fall in the trap of designing by committee (see above).

After the review

Wrap-up

Design is a team sport! Design reviews allow us to come together to create a safe space for candid feedback, explore multiple solutions to a problem, align on general design direction, and create empathy for each other and our craft.

When done right, design reviews are one of most powerful tools in the quest to move design from good to great. They can dramatically improve the quality of solutions we create for customers and raise the collective knowledge and skill set of the design team.

Thanks for reading!