Prescriptive Feedback

The other day a coworker observed that when I provide design feedback it's usually not prescriptive. They meant it as a compliment, but that compliment struck me in an interesting way, and started me reflecting on why my preferred feedback style is not telling other designers what to do. When I started to think about my early career as a designer, I realized that I always appreciated the mentors who led me along a path of figuring things out for myself, as opposed to telling me what I needed to do. I experienced both types of feedback styles as a younger designer.

My impression of more senior coworkers who used feedback opportunities to tell me how to do my work is that they were impatient with my greenness, or that they wished they could do the work themselves. My problem solving brain would shut off as I fell into a mindset of trying to please the more experienced designer by bringing their vision to life.

Better mentors would give me things to think about. "Did you think about it like this?" "How would it look through a different lens?" "Is there a way you can tell a more engaging story?" When I shared me work they didn't give me the answer, they gave me a thread to pull. And pulling on that thread would usually lead me to my own solution.

Not only did the second, leading question style of feedback teach me more, it resulted in work that I had confidence in and could advocate for. Whenever I fell into the trap of designing to please the person providing feedback, I would end up with results that I didn't fully understand or believe in. Much of a designer's job revolves around winning other people over to your way of thinking, and that's much harder to do if you don't back the work 100%. You have to really believe in something to convince other people to go along with you. When a good mentor provided a lead to follow, the responsibility for the solution would still be mine. When I eventually got to that solution, I had gone through an evolutionary process that made me believe in it.

On taking and processing feedback

One of the most important skills you can develop as a designer is becoming good at processing all the feedback you receive. First you go through a phase where you're afraid to show other people your work until it's perfect. Eventually when you start to share your work earlier, and with more people, but it creates a new —you have to figure out how to manage all the feedback that comes in. You're going to get a lot of it, and most of it won't be relevant or even helpful. You need to learn how to graciously listen to everything people suggest to you, and then ignore large chunks of it. Distill the feedback down into the most useful parts that have the potential to make your work better.

How to assess feedback

You have to think critically about every bit of feedback that people have to offer you and ask yourself the following questions:

Is there a real, valid feeling lurking behind the feedback?

Regardless of whether feedback feels helpful on the surface, you can often trust the gut feeling that prompted it. In the past when I've presented visual design work to people, sometimes all they can think to say is that they don't like it. You can do work to unpack that comment into more valuable feedback, but you shouldn't dismiss it outright because even though, "I don't like this" isn't helpful, the feeling that prompted it is a signal of something.

Even though this feedback feels immediately wrong or unhelpful, can I use it to take my work in a new direction?

An important dynamic of providing healthy feedback in a group is a feeling of vulnerability that allows people to propose ideas that feel intuitively wrong to everyone in the room. These ideas shouldn't be dismissed, because even if they don't work as-stated, they can unlock new ways of thinking about old problems.

How might my thinking change if I looked at it through the lens of this feedback?

If you try looking at the same problem from a different perspective, does it open a different solution space?

Does this suggestion move my work closer in the direction of what I'm trying to accomplish, or further away?

If you do the thing that's suggested, in your best estimate will it move you closer to your goal or further away from it? Sometimes you have to try the thing to know for sure.

In conclusion

I suggest adopting this level of discerning ownership because although many people will usually be involved and even accountable on some level for the quality of your work, the largest portion of accountability and ownership belongs to you. You need to be a valve that lets in some ideas and restricts the flow of others. It takes practice, but in time you will become very good at sifting through feedback and using it to do better work that you believe in.