I usually explain it to clients with this story: A bunch of admirals was asked to plan out a military campaign for a written exam. They were all accomplished strategists, but when confronted with a blank piece of paper, they all failed the test. So the navy paired them off, allowing each team to share notes. Instantly they started acing the test. All it took was that little bit of outside perspective, all of a sudden you see a bigger picture.
That’s what the Google Ventures design critique does for us.
We stay pretty close to Google Ventures’ guide on how to run a design critique. We start with a small team, focused on a specific part of the design, fitted with the following set of rules:
- Designers can’t pitch their designs, because it robs us of our fresh set of eyes
- Each reviewer will spend up to 10 minutes reviewing the design alone before providing feedback
- Both positive and negative feedback must be given
- No designing in the meeting — identify the problems, don’t create the solutions
We've got to fall in love with the problem, that’s our job as designers. But it’s hard to see the problems in your own work. The GV design critique is a chance to say “I'm a designer, I have questions,” so a cross-disciplinary team can help you quickly uncover all the potential problems hiding in your design. We apply the Google Ventures process to our website design critiques, our graphic design critiques, our app design critiques, our research critiques whatever it is that we’re building because it’s versatile enough to get us honest answers every time.
The GV design critique creates a safe, structured place for discussion and disagreement. As people, we have a tendency to try to soften the blows when we’re discussing problems with a design. But as a team, we owe each other — and our clients — more than that. Without finding those problems, it's hard for a design to ever be successful.
Will, our senior UX strategist, says outright that he thinks the critique process is the most valuable thing we do for our clients. Here’s how we use the GV design review to save our clients money:
Coalescing a team around a client’s goals — fast
When we talk about the cost of a project, we're usually talking about the results. But so much of that cost happens at the beginning of a project. It’s very difficult to get a team to have shared understanding of a client’s needs and business objectives, and to understand that client’s users. If you can get everyone to do that very quickly and very clearly, it reduces the cost for the entire project. By locking our team in a room together, everyone is able to combine their individual view of the client to get a precise collective picture. It saves us each from having to do hours of research or shipping a poor experience for your users, and it ensures we’re all working toward the same goals, rather than from our own siloed views.
Empowering everyone to have a useful voice in the design
When we first implemented this process, Robin Dunlop, who does our QA work, actually began to talk to me differently as a designer. He stopped trying to offer me solutions and started telling me, "Hey Zeke, here's a problem, I just want you to understand that this is a problem and it's yours to solve." We instantly went from wasting 30 minutes trying to figure out the problem each time, to having a five-minute conversation that captured the issue.
In the room, we keep the design critique focused on the problem. There’s no designing in the room, which can be a real challenge for some people. We explain that you can’t say to move a button, but you should instead say that you’re worried a button is getting lost and you want it to have more weight in the visual hierarchy. How that happens is a designer’s problem to solve. In some cases the problem is too complicated to discuss without a solution. So the facilitator’s job is to have them state the solution, and then work backwards into the problem. And then the problem is still what we're capturing.
To make sure everyone is providing their honest opinions, we have each person spend five to 10 minutes alone with the design, jotting down their thoughts. That way we avoid groupthink, where everyone responds to the first idea instead of voicing their honest reactions. It also gives introverts the ability to collect their thoughts first, so they’re more comfortable voicing them. When an extrovert brings up a topic, the quieter people in the room get an opportunity to feel validated, because they already have that in their notebooks. And because we're strong facilitators, most of the time we're looking for people who are being quiet and seek out their participation.
