Giving Feedback As A Designer - A Crucial Part Of Your Career
How can we improve as designers and help others grow if we don't give feedback? Feedback is essential 🙌
By Furquan Ahmad · August 16, 2022Originally sent in my Ready Set Grow newsletter
Hi Reader,
A key part in your career to improve as a designer is learning how to give and receive hard feedback well.
Whether you’re giving feedback in a 1:1, a design crit, or working with an engineer or product manager, giving feedback is a key part of enjoying your role, finding opportunities to learn and grow.
Be sincere in your approach
If there’s one thing you remember, it is being sincere. Give feedback with the intention that you genuinely want to help improve someone.
Start with heart - You need to be clear about your goals with yourself and your intention. What do you want out of the conversation?
Caring Personally and challenging directly -
You could care personally for someone, but know the quality of work they’re producing could be better, this could be a poorly written project scope, the visual for a design isn’t up to scratch or the execution for your design needs improving.
Instead of being honest, you may be inclined to lie and say it’s okay or fine to protect a person, as you’re worried about hurting the person's feelings. You’re doing more harm than good.
By not giving any feedback or being honest when giving feedback, your teammates will not be able to improve unless someone points out to them what they could be doing better.
Compounding problems
This eventually compounds and can affect the performance of the entire team, people may have to pull in extra hours of work to cover for said teammate, their own standard of work might start to slip due to the extra hours they’ve had to put in.
When to give feedback?
Feedback ideally should be given immediately where the context is fresh. Praise publicly, criticise privately.
Making it less awkward
Getting to know people on a personal level can really help create the safe place to give honest feedback. You can still be professional while still finding time for real conversations.
Be sure to make feedback not feel like a personal attack. Simple things like saying "I think that’s wrong", compared to “you’re wrong”.
Framework
This is the framework I like to use when giving feedback to my peers.
COIN Framework -
Context - Set the scene, somewhere private or virtual
Observation - stating facts
Impact - how it affected you
Next steps - Talk through other person's view
How To Give And Receive Feedback As A Designer.
In this video, we talk through a crucial skill for designers, which is learning how to give effective feedback to your peers as well as learning how to receive feedback well.
Feedback is an essential part of our growth as designers. It's important to practise and nail this skill as early as you can, to help you grow as much as possible.
Radical Candor By Kim Scott.
This book really helped me change my approach and thinking when it comes to giving feedback. Kim Scott talks about the importance of caring personally, being sincere and the consequences of not giving good quality feedback.
If you haven’t already I recommend giving the first half of this book a read to grasp the main concepts.
The Biggest iOS 16 Design Changes.
In this video we dive into the biggest iOS 16 design updates. We look at changes to the lock screen with brand new lock screen widgets.
How will they change the behaviour model of how someone uses an app?
