set of design principles to help guide you in deciding between ideas for an
interface. There are best practices for establishing and using design principles.
For example, a good design principle should help you eliminate more ideas
than you pursue and it should be specific and avoid overly subjective and
ambiguous terms like “fun”. As such, with best practices like these, when your
team creates principles for your next creation or project, you have an
opportunity for critiquing your principles against them.
Chapter Summary
In order to work together, team members will have countless conversations
throughout the course of a project. Many of those conversations will involve
discussions about what they’re creating: its features, its content, its look and
feel, etc. Often, these conversations can be unproductive or even painful and
detrimental to the project and team.
Many of the reasons for these problems can stem from our understanding of
“feedback” which is often how these conversations (or elements of them) are
labeled. There are a few problems with “feedback”
Use of “feedback” as a label is fairly ambiguous. It can be used to
label any response to what someone has done or created.
By definition feedback is nothing more than a reaction. And reactions
themselves often aren’t helpful to helping us understand what is or
isn’t working in what we’ve created.
Feedback does not inherently include the two elements most
important to helping us understand what is or isn’t working in what
we’ve created: critical thinking and a focus on the creations
objectives.
Feedback itself can be categorized in 3 forms: reaction, direction and
critique.Critique is a form of analysis that uses critical thinking to ask whether what
we’ve created will work to achieve the goals and objectives we are designing
for. It can, and should, be a part of any formal or informal discussion we have
about what we’re creating. It’s important that we learn about critique because
it’s useful to us for a number of reasons:
It builds shared vocabularies: by regularly having conversations
focused on critical thinking and objectives for the product, teams will
begin to use the same labels and language when describing things,
leading to more efficient communication.