Take Design Feedback from Non-Designers

Tiny Tactics: How to Take Design Feedback from Non-Designers

There’s no shortage of great articles about how to give and receive design critiques. But what I’ve learned over the years is that most of your design critiques will be with teammates outside of your design team — those surely not versed in design theory and technique.

Instead designers spend most iterations based on feedback from users, technical teammates, and stakeholders. Handling this feedback is much different than that from your designers.

In fact, how you handle this feedback is much more important to your career than how you handle design critiques.

Informative and humbling.

Bad UI and Missile Alerts

Kottke: Bad Design in Action: the False Hawaiian Ballistic Missile Alert

The employee made a mistake but it’s not his fault and he shouldn’t be fired for it. The interface is the problem and whoever caused that to happen — the designer, the software vendor, the heads of the agency, the lawmakers who haven’t made sufficient funds available for a proper design process to occur — should face the consequences. More importantly, the necessary changes should be made to fix the problem in a way that’s holistic, resilient, long-lasting, and helps operators make good decisions rather than encouraging mistakes.

The false alarm is not a left v. right issue. It’s not about any particular administration. It might be reductive to say it’s solely a design issue, but bad design leads to errors. Leaving designers out of anything people will interact with is never a good idea.

Value good design.