For more on formal critiques and the design process, see Chapter 3.
Asking for Feedback For Praise or Validation
Creating something can feel awesome. Whether we do it alone or as part of a
team it’s not unusual to want to be recognized for our creations. But when it’s
our motivation for asking for feedback, it can bite us in the ass.
And yet we do it often. We share our work with statements like “Hey! Check
out this thing I just made! I’d love your thoughts on it.” When really, the only
thoughts we want to hear are: “Way to go!” Looks awesome!” and
“Congratulations!”
So we wait for the cheers. Some come, and it feels great. But then we get some
feedback about things that aren’t so great, things we could have done better,
and it hurts. No matter how valid the points may be, we aren’t in a mindset
where we want to hear them. So we get defensive. Maybe we argue and try to
discredit the feedback. Maybe we ignore the comments. But either way, we
haven’t done a very good job at receiving critique even though we’ve asked
for it.
Best Practices For Receiving Critique
As we’ve described, receiving critique in a way that’s productive goes beyond
just asking for it and then sitting back to let others give you their thoughts.
When receiving critique, keep the following best practices in mind:
Remember the purpose. Critique is about understanding and
improvement, not judgment.
There is no such thing as a perfect solution. There is always room for
improvement. A goal of a critique is to help identify where those opportunities
are. The conversations we have during critique act as road-signs along the
evolution of our ideas and creations, helping us to understand which paths
might take us closer to our end goals. Critique isn’t about pass or fail, approval
or rejection. They are a reflection used to inform a next step.
Listen and think before responding.
Many of us have a bad habit of not really listening when someone is speaking
to us. Instead we hear the first few words they say, and then instead of
listening to them continue to speak, we begin to formulate a response and wait
for the first opportunity to start talking.
What this means is that while the person we should be paying attention to is
explaining their thought, instead of listening to and processing that explanation
we’ve essentially ignored it. It’s not that we’ve done so maliciously, this is a
common occurrence and most of us do it. Obviously though, this is
counterproductive to what we’re trying to do in a critique. When receiving