The flashback

The judging words of your classmates help you gauge your success at delivering your message. Your very first experience with design research, if you will.

As any doctor knows, the first step in a diagnosis is listening to someone complain about what hurts. — Frank Chimero

You present, they ask questions, they tell you what they think, you ask more questions. Then, they present, you ask questions, you share what you think, you answer their questions.

This is a valuable experience I keep looking back to, because for the rest of our lives as designers we team-up non-stop with other “classmates” within our organization. Marketing teams, sales teams, customer support teams, developers, everybody—The hard part is that not everyone we work with has gone through the same design critique bootcamp we’ve gone through.

My challenge

For the past 8 months I’ve been working in-house, after years in a freelance/remote lifestyle, and I’ve come face-to-face with one of the most popular challenges in-house designers face at a company: our culture is unfamiliar with the true value of design.

This is a bigger problem that shows itself in many different ways, e.g.:

unproductive feedback sessions

countless revisions

unmet deadlines

little collaboration between departments

You may experience these things and not realize that these are symptoms of a culture that has yet to learn the importance of adopting a design thinking approach. But the sooner you understand what the actual problem is, the sooner you can start focusing on finding a solution.

Acknowledging these challenges and communicating them to others who would benefit from addressing them (i.e. designers, product managers, developers) has helped me make small moves towards a multiple-step solution.

The first step: addressing unproductive feedback sessions

I wondered, how can I prevent visual design presentations from turning into a preferences debate? And that’s when my school years flashed back. We, designers, are so used to getting and giving feedback we forget how to empathize with people who are unfamiliar with the process. Back in school, we were probably all silently (or vocally) judgmental, full of personal preferences and probably not very helpful.

I think we, designers, forget that giving feedback is a skill we’ve been training for a long time. Even now, it’s still not simple being objective 100% of the time. Emotion can some times creep in if we’re unfocused. So, in my quest to build a stronger design culture, I try to remind myself and other designers that we need to have empathy with others in our organization.

We also need to educate about the right way to have a productive feedback session. That means being mindful about the language you use to request and give feedback, so that you lead by example.

I like to invite people to help me assess how successful something is. And I use the words “weaker” or “stronger” when I share my opinion about something, because they help me talk about a spectrum within the quality of good; instead of polarizing terms like “good” or “bad”.

Most importantly, I’m very clear and honest about why I’m asking people for their feedback. The mindset being: “You are the {{ marketing / sales / business / development / customer }} expert. I’m the design expert. We are both after the same business goals. Let’s join forces!”

Childhood memories FTW

It’s a partnership—and to foster its health you should try to be transparent about the impact of their feedback in your process. How was it helpful? What kind of changes do you plan to make? The collaboration won’t be sustainable if you don’t make people feel heard.

What’s next

Enabling people to have successful feedback sessions is only a small piece of the puzzle and I’ve resolved that the solution lies in designers leading productive conversations through empathy. Now, my next move towards a stronger design culture focuses on democratizing design knowledge (i.e. design systems, design research, design principles) to help the whole product team speak the same language. Stay tuned :)

How about you? How are you tackling the challenges of building a design culture where you are?