
What Working at Facebook Has Taught Me About Design Critique - tannerc
https://medium.com/@tannerc/critique-is-an-important-part-of-any-design-process-whether-you-work-as-part-of-a-team-or-solo-ef3dcb299ce3#.ie6x6ae4m
======
tkt
Learning to give and receive feedback is one of the skills that will make you
and your team better and is an important part of communication. Effective
communication is crucial, no matter the size of the team. The list of the
distinctions between 'criticism' and 'criticism' in this article is
particularly valuable.

Criticism passes judgement — Critique poses questions; Criticism finds fault —
Critique uncovers opportunity; Criticism is personal — Critique is objective;
Criticism is vague — Critique is concrete; Criticism tears down — Critique
builds up; Criticism is ego-centric — Critique is altruistic; Criticism is
adversarial — Critique is cooperative; Criticism belittles the designer —
Critique improves the design

~~~
philliphaydon
I disagree. Criticism is awesome. If people can't handle criticism then they
should change profession. If 1 person says something negative. Then there's
1000s more who feel the same who say nothing.

Constructive criticism is even better.

Criticism is only personal if you make it personal. Criticism is only
egocentric if you make it egocentric. Criticism is on vague when it is not
constructive. Criticism only belittles if it is targeted at the person and not
the thing being critiqued.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
>Criticism is only personal if you make it personal. Criticism is only
egocentric if you make it

That usually begins with the person doing the criticizing.

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makecheck
It's vital to learn to see past emotion when receiving statements from
critics.

I have heard lots of comments about my projects over the years and I have
noticed some patterns:

\- Negative feedback is usually all you get. You have to motivate yourself by
imagining that most people are pretty happy based on downloads/client-
count/whatever.

\- People aren't good at communicating when they're frustrated but they
usually turn into nice people once you've fixed the problem. Most people just
have a job to do and a deadline to meet. Pay attention to what they say is
wrong, and not their mood.

\- Strangely, people will spend great amounts of time writing comments on
random web sites or review pages about issues that they will _never even
E-mail you about_ , no matter how easy you make it for them to contact you.
Therefore, if you _really_ want to get some realistic critiques of your work,
you may have to scour the web for them. I look at it this way: real, honest
feedback is _rare_ and _vital_ to really understand what you may have
overlooked. Even if you can't possibly contact the Random Web Commenter, find
and fix their issues and you'll end up with a better product.

------
moron4hire
I don't think this is useful for startups in general. It sounds like it's good
for gigantocorps like IBM and Facebook (and yes, I'm lumping them together, as
they have more in common than they differ). For a lean startup, I don't think
you're going to have the depth in your staff nor the time to put into these
sorts of activities. It's all-hands-on-deck, and we don't have time to slow
down and hand-hold each other through their own work. I'd be hiring people I
trust to get their work done without me needing to tell them they are or are
not doing a good job.

I mean, at a particularly early stage startup, establishing the "three roles"
could be _the entire company_. In such a scenario, how do we not already know
each other's intimate business?

~~~
shalmanese
This is one of those "slow down to speed up" kind of things that startups
ignore at their peril. People, especially technical types, have a mistaken
assumption that "speed" in startupland is based on the amount of code shipped
and anything that distracts from code shipping is a distraction to be
ruthlessly excised.

The real speed that a startup should be optimizing for is the degree of new,
actionable, insights produced on the quest towards product/market fit. Code
should only be built insofar as it helps provide scaffolding towards that
goal.

Design critique is helpful because it helps you get faster at getting faster.
It's not some crutch that weaker designers need to adopt to keep up with the
rest of us, it's a fundamental way in which designers learn and get better at
their craft.

~~~
moron4hire
But look at the artifice of this whole process. The need to establish "roles".
The prescribed language. If I did that with my team, they'd rightly look at me
sideways and say, "what the hell is wrong with you, just spit it out already."

It's not that I'm advocating a heads-down, never-come-up-for-air approach.
It's that I'd expect these sort of conversations to have happened in an
organic fashion that doesn't cargo-cult corporate policy gerrymandering.

~~~
lox
Sometimes a little bit of ceremony helps change existing behaviors and gives
people with different perspectives the opportunities to speak up.

~~~
goldenkey
So far from true. At a startup, everyone is blunt, because it pays to be.
Everyone there is counting on success.

Whereas at a corp, the ceremony was created by someone else who may not even
work there anymore, for some superpsionic reasons that everyone basically just
shrugs at because they don't want to lose their jobs. It'a a sludsgefest that
startups can skip - no point in needless vagaries when in a startup, it's
actually appreciated to collaborate organically instead of being culled for
doing so.

~~~
lox
So much of that response is utterly loaded with flawed assumptions. The irony
is that your response is exactly why sometimes it's important to be cognisant
of how to conduct critical conversations. It's not about "needless vagaries",
it's actually about direct and on-point critique, without the loaded value
judgements. This isn't a skill that tends to come naturally to people, that's
what the "ceremony" is for.

------
design
Read this a few weeks ago. Really useful advice.

------
dasil003
Speaking of design critique, are young people able to read articles with
hilarious animated gifs in them? Because I literally cannot; a pity because
the first section seemed promising.

~~~
afro88
More and more I'm getting in the habit of hitting the "Reader View" button in
Safari. It removes all ads, gifs, "related content" etc. and gives me the pure
content: the article in an easy to read font.

~~~
mintplant
Firefox also has a built-in Reader View but it leaves the graphics in, in case
they are referred to by and necessary to understand the text.

------
forrestthewoods
Yes

Edit: Fuck your downvotes. I answered his question. HN is such a shit show
these days.

~~~
dang
> _Fuck your downvotes. [...] HN is such a shit show these days._

Please don't post comments like this.

We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10922770](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10922770)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
forrestthewoods
Someone asked a yes/no question. I answered yes. And got downvoted. I stand by
my statement.

~~~
dang
Everyone gets downvoted. Yes, it's annoying, but venting that annoyance back
on the site adds nothing of value, only off-topic noise. The HN guidelines ask
everyone not to do that, so please don't do that.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
forrestthewoods
How do I delete my HN account and all it's comments?

~~~
softawre
[http://lmgtfy.com/?q=How+do+I+delete+my+HN+account+and+all+i...](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=How+do+I+delete+my+HN+account+and+all+it%27s+comments)

~~~
forrestthewoods
Thanks for this reply. It saves me from having to explain why I'd want to do
such a thing.

