Dear designer, feedback is not personal.
What is feedback?
In design, feedback is a call for iteration, a reviewing of the design within its original constraints, and the seeking of refinement areas to bring the designs closer to their intended purpose. ******************
Why is it not personal?
Good feedback always refines the design towards user (or business) needs. This means it’s not really about you. It’s about refining the approach to the solution. It’s about enhancing design choices to better align with user (and sometimes business) needs.
How to receive feedback
At the start of my academic career, design was an emotional exercise for me. It was, to me, an art borne of several hours of toil and countless iterations based on my “designer intuition”. And so there was nothing more nerve-wracking, more blood-boiling, more eye-roll-inducing than meeting with “unfavourable” critique of my precious design work.
Sadly, I find that this is how some designers are today. This is unhelpful for your growth as a designer and your relationships with others.
So let’s talk about how to receive feedback:
- Ask and you shall receive. Giving detailed feedback is an exercise of attention and intentionality and so people usually won’t give you detailed, constructive feedback unprovoked. You must ask for it. Note that the quality and relevance of the feedback you receive is always closely linked to how you ask (but this is a topic for another day).
- Empathise with the feedback giver. Time to put your empathy skills to use instead of just decorating your portfolio with the word :) First, thank your reviewer for their feedback. Then consider their viewpoint. What perspective are they bringing to the feedback they’ve given? How do they see things and how has that informed the feedback they’ve given?
Here’s a great example: Your design lead reviews your work on a 0–1 project and drops a bunch of comments on your Figma file advising you to use some existing design patterns instead of the ones you spent hours designing. A good way to receive this is to think about how this design lead probably has insight into the bandwidth of engineering to implement your new design ideas, because at that level, they are familiar with the product roadmap and resourcing across projects. So it’s not a personal negation to your work. - Pick your “battles”. When is it worth pushing back and when is it worth just following direction?
For the former, maybe you have a lot of questions about the reasoning behind the feedback. You can ask in a non-condescending way. The more clarity you have, the easier it would be to action the feedback you’ve received.
For the latter, you might be working in new territory, unaware of the rules. When you get feedback here, don’t fight it. Rather, adhere. As you observe the existing patterns, note the areas for improvement and suggest enhancements. Existing designs usually exist for a reason. Seek to understand patterns before challenging or changing them. If you go in a completely different design direction, you might be upset when you are directed back to the already charted paths, so tread wisely.
In a nutshell, dear friend, feedback on your design work is not personal. While I admit to the existence of rude and even narcissistic feedback, we can choose to manage and improve our responses rather than adjusting our behaviour in response to negative conduct from others. So keep working to refine your reception of feedback. Soon, you’ll learn to create great work from the feedback you’ve actioned.
