between the presenter and critic, email tends to push people to generate longer
lists of comments, each of which might spur it’s own conversation.
It’s almost always true that the best method for critique is a real conversation,
but that isn’t to say that you can’t collect useful critique through email or other
digital means. Just make sure that when you do, you pick platforms, or
structure your requests in ways that maximize the opportunities for back-and-
forth discussion of discrete aspects or elements in your creation. Products and
services that allow you to annotate documents with comments are often a good
start for this.
Critique, Conversation and Questions
Our hope, as you’ve read this chapter is that it’s become clear that good
critique, critiques that are productive for the entire team, are the result of
dialogue. The giver and receiver request and exchange information back and
forth, and from those exchanges come useful, actionable insights. This means
that, in a productive critique, there are often a lot of questions asked by both
parties.
In fact, great critiques are often more about questions asked than statements
made. Questions being asked means that assumptions can be validated,
eliminated or further examined collaboratively. Which means that the
feedback being collected is based upon a mutually understood foundation
rather than individual’s different interpretations. It’s also useful for the
recipient to pay attention to the questions being asked as they can be signs as
to what elements of the creation may be clear or confusing to others.
This should also tell you something about how best to ask for feedback and
which communication platforms make the most sense. It’s common for
designers or teams to send their creations to other members of the team via
email and ask for feedback. It’s also common for these kinds of exchanges to
become problematic. Email isn’t a great conduit for anything resembling real
time conversations. It isn’t designed to work that way, but being able to
quickly ask questions and get back responses that allow you to further your
thinking and either ask additional questions, or provide insights is key. When
dealing with multiple people giving feedback, these deficiencies become even
more pronounced as now you need to manage threads, keep track of who gets
what information via replies and reply-alls, etc. We’ve all likely experienced
situations where feedback was originally solicited by email, and after one or
two replies, a conference call or in-person meeting was called because it just
seemed easier than trying to make sense of the lists of questions and comments
coming back.
Online feedback tools like inVision app and others do their best to try to work
around this, by allowing people to comment on specific aspects of a design