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Embracing Public Design Discourse(medium.com)
almost 4 years ago from Gabriel Valdivia, Head of Design @ Canopy
Gabriel Valdivia, almost 4 years ago
I actually agree with most of what you're saying here. Which statement in particular do you believe lowers the bar? I've said a few and admittedly not all of them raise the bar.
To be clear, I was trying to say that, although "I don't like this" is rarely useful, it can be. It's certainly more useful than saying nothing at all. Especially if it kickstarts a discussion where the person receiving the feedback can tease out more useful insights. But I agree with you that there are many better ways to give feedback.
In the original article I try to encourage feedback of all kinds and link to other articles by smarter people than me who have given tips on how to give useful feedback. My hope is that it leads to more conversations which make both parties grow.
Such a universal statement from you doesn't really work, as I'm sure you know. Three example scenarios come to mind:
If you're getting feedback from random people on Dribbble saying "I don't like this" you're going to have a difficult time sussing out what exactly it is they don't like, whether or not the feedback matters, etc.
If you're in a design critique and a design manager says "I don't like this" you have a better chance of digging into that feedback to make it valuable, but such an instance merely demonstrates poor management and the likelihood of a hangup here is high (as we've all sign in any critique with junior designers and managers conversing).
But then more nuanced than those examples, if the feedback from a peer you're sitting one-on-one with, you then have a good chance to make the feedback valuable by digging in with them.
So saying feedback like "I don't like this" is helpful is really not accurate. But, again, it's not universal one way or the other.
My point is simply that it's not much to strive for better feedback in our industry. And statements like yours lower the bar rather than raise it.
"I don't like this because it doesn't feel aligned with the larger brand" or" I don't like this because it's hard for my old eyes to read" are vastly more helpful in each of the instances I outlined above, immediately more directional or guiding, and take at most a second more to say.