(See my earlier posts for introduction to the series.)
As a design lead, your work is continuously under critique. It is in the nature of designers to criticize and receive critique. Therefore I have sometimes made the mistake of directly criticizing work of other disciplines. They might not take it very well. Although I must be able to take it, they are not used to it.
Part of the job of a design leader is to review other designers work. There are a couple of ways how this typically happens: through informal discussions, through official review meetings, or reviewing designs off-line on paper. My absolute favorite out of these are the informal discussions with designers. In that way, we usually get into interesting and relevant discussions where the deep joint understanding is eventually formed.
Quite often in a busy environment you need to do reviews very quickly. This I find very disturbing. User experience is not skin deep: you cannot review a design by just quickly looking at it. This may work with traditional industrial or graphic design, where the design is everything you see. But with design that has several layers of interaction, you need to spend considerable amount of time to walk through plenty of use cases in order to understand if the whole design makes sense.
The most risky part in hasty reviews is that it is very easy to spot simple mistakes. But it is almost impossible to see if something elementary is missing. If a task flow of making phone calls doesn’t provide the way to save the number of an unanswered call for later use, it is not an acceptable design. To spot that, you need to spend a fair amount of quality time with the design and the background documentation. If you don’t spot the omissions and still approve the designs, you will be accountable for those later.
Reviews are probably unavoidable, but try to arrange them in the way that you truly can invest the time in them that you need. Otherwise, they are close to useless and potentially very risky.
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sunshinecity (c) Creative Commons
it’s about feedback, in a systems thinking sense. reviews are *the* situation in time and place in which the “design process” as a system is organized so that feedback is allowed to influence the process. and when you look it like this, that influence better be of good quality. :)
i was thinking at some point that i’d work on a small presentation on giving good feedback (and receiving it). maybe i need to talk with you about the ideas for that..