Unhelpful Feedback

It's common for designers to receive feedback on their work that isn't very helpful. But that doesn't mean the feedback isn't valid, or that it can't be trusted. When I receive unhelpful feedback, I usually find that there's merit to the deeper feelings motivating the feedback.

Maybe you're designing a workflow and one of your stakeholders has started counting taps or clicks. "This took 5 taps," they say, and that's far too many taps. You could press play on your usual talk track about how the number of taps isn't the best metric to follow when judging the usability of an interface. Or you could rekindle another old flame, and make the argument that a brilliantly clear 5-tap workflow is far preferable to a super confusing 2-tap workflow. Sometimes that works.

But instead of doing that, I would try to look deeper. A lot of times the words that people choose for feedback represent some raw feeling that they can't easily articulate. The raw feeling underpinning feedback about the number of taps it takes to complete a task is that of too much complexity. Whatever you designed doesn't feel simple enough. It's easy to scoff when one of your stakeholders starts counting taps, but if you consider that what they might really be worried about is that the flow seems too complicated, then that changes things. If complexity is the problem, then you need to probe into that and find out where it's coming from.

Wrangling feedback is its own sort of skill in this sense. As a designer you have to think critically about the feedback you receive and decide what to do with it. If you get feedback that seems vague or unhelpful, part of what you need to do is figure out if there's some deeper, legit feeling driving the feedback. And if there is, then you need to reframe the conversation so that it becomes more helpful. In the case of counting taps, the problem is not in the number of taps, but in the deeper feeling of complexity. An actually helpful critique would pivot away from the math, and towards figuring out the real cause of the complexity.

There's nothing very new in all this. It's just important to remember that expressing how you feel about design work can be hard even when you're a designer. An important part of what we do is help our collaborators find the right words to express how they really feel about the things we design. It's important not to dismiss feedback outright just because it seems unhelpful, because quite often the feelings driving the feedback can be trusted.