Optimizing Feedback: The Power of Asking the Right Questions for Improved Outcomes

Cliff Seal at UXDX Community: Revolutionizing Design: From Feedback to Data Insights. Video: https://youtu.be/czhx4ku2_9s

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

The most universal experience for designers

[00:00:00] I'm willing to bet that everybody on this call, listening to this video, listening to this audio, has probably experienced a design critique, so to speak, that made you feel pretty uncomfortable. That may have been in a group setting at work, or through an unsolicited Slack DM from a co-worker, or a client review meeting, or a college class, or a UX boot camp. And maybe in that moment you felt that the feedback was actually unhelpful, or maybe the delivery of the feedback was kind of offensive, or maybe the feedback was insightful in a way that surprised you and it caught you a little bit off guard.

[00:00:40] There's really no level of emotional detachment that's strong enough to prevent a designer from wanting to get to the right answer sooner rather than later. If you care about your craft you're probably going to experience that moment of uncomfortable tension, because you're learning in that moment that there's still more work to be done. And that moment of uncomfortability is possibly the most universal experience for designers of all kinds. It's a rare professional context where we can empathize with all of our colleagues across this design practice of ours. But it's really critical to remember that not everyone experiences that uncomfortability in the same way, and the harm that's caused by poor communication is never equally distributed. We're going to come back to that for sure.

[00:01:28] But for now, let's probably agree on a foundational thing. In most design work, with product or web especially, designers are tasked with creating solutions that render the intent of a customer in a way that aligns with business goals. And in a dream world, both customer intent and business goals would be in some kind of magically canonical document that always has the right amount of information or context for everyone who needs to read it. That'll never happen. But even if it did, design would still be a professional guessing game about human behavior and outcomes at scale.

[00:02:00] And so in this sense, uncomfortability is inherently unavoidable, and the effective task of design is to publicly ask questions to the right combination of people to satisfy basically known and unknown requirements. And design is about finding paths not to take, so that we can increase the likelihood of our final success. We know that logically there's no such thing as a right or perfect design, and so we're forced to solicit feedback in some form or another. We regularly invite that shared experience of uncomfortability, knowing that we have to go through that experience to do our jobs well.

[00:02:39] And designers who care deeply about their craft often discover this positive correlation between feedback frequency and design quality. In other words, theoretically, more feedback means better designs, faster, time after time. That's a nice holy grail design equation that we can talk about in theory, but you're probably already thinking about at least one problem with it in practice. And one of those problems is that not all feedback is equally valuable.

The harm is not equally distributed

[00:03:08] Oftentimes the human beings who are delivering this feedback do so in a way that makes you want to burn your computer and retire somewhere into the woods in a log cabin with no internet. Sometimes we are the people who end up delivering feedback in this terrible way even though we don't mean it. The risk of encountering useless or poorly delivered feedback affects everybody, but like I said earlier, the harm is not equally distributed.

[00:03:47] To put it extremely lightly, we know that people experience more toxic behavior in the workplace when their gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, neurodiversity and more differ from the statistically average, especially in countries like America, the average American white dude. And on top of that we also know that all of us carry our own stories and burdens, and you'll never know what someone else is going through.

[00:04:15] And that's really important context, because if we want to do our jobs well as designers, we're going to have to be vulnerable in trusted environments with a diversity of viewpoints. We are going to have to reverse engineer the willing solicitation of feedback by ourselves and our design teams in a way that doesn't also burn people out emotionally or physically. And we ourselves have to be present and self-aware enough to manage our own emotional responses in that moment and over time.

[00:04:44] So the way that we give and receive feedback matters really deeply, and it directly contributes to the effectiveness of our work and our career. It's a skill that can grow through thoughtful practice, but it requires a sense of personal responsibility.

Questions to fall back on

[00:05:02] On top of needing that sense of personal responsibility, the only other thing I think you'll need really to get started are good questions to fall back on. And that's mostly what we're going to talk about for the rest of our time, because no matter who you are, how long you've been a designer, whatever, finding a way to stay curious in really difficult moments helps unlock deeper insights and cultivates a trusting environment. But it can be really hard to find the right words, especially in intense or emotional moments.

[00:05:32] So what I'm going to do is give you questions that you can reliably use when you're not sure what to say next, and they're going to apply to four really common contexts for designers: receiving design feedback, giving design feedback, receiving career feedback, and giving career feedback. Now, in some moments the questions we'll talk about today may be helpful resources just in times of high anxiety or uncertainty, and that's perfectly fine. In other moments these questions might be best deployed when you are noticing that others are giving unhelpful or unclear feedback and you want to help steer the conversation.

[00:06:09] This talk is based on a lot of thoughtful feedback from folks that I have worked with over many years, so my hope is that these questions are useful for everyone, all kinds of people. They aim to open up conversation and try to reintroduce curiosity in a way that's really safe and caring for everybody, because we can't prevent the harmful communication of others, but we can be responsible for ourselves. And we can be honest, direct and kind all at once. I really want to encourage everyone with this: we can do this. We can keep the shared outcome of the group in mind and stay focused on the goal of what we're actually doing in that moment. And when we are ready we can speak with intention, and then we can listen to others with attention, so that we can do feedback well.

Receiving feedback from users: how do you feel about that?

[00:07:03] So let's start with the most common context, and this is especially common and helpful for the earliest career stages in design, and that is receiving design feedback. We're going to break that down into two really common sources, because as you'll see, they kind of help you practice and ramp up. So first, feedback from users and customers that you get through testing, interviews, talking to users and customers. And then secondly we'll talk about feedback from co-workers, traditionally thought of as design critique or design feedback.

[00:07:39] So let's start here. Luckily the relative toxicity of user feedback is pretty low. Our more common problem in that moment is getting really clear and valuable feedback from human beings who are terrible predictors of their own behavior. That means that user testing can be a relatively healthy environment for you to practice soliciting feedback about your work.

[00:08:00] And I would say for many designers, including myself, user testing is where it sort of starts beginning to click for you that feedback is not only valuable in and of itself, but that feedback can be designed. And you can begin to see that the goal of most studies isn't actually to validate a design so much as it is to extract insights that increase your confidence in the work itself. And that's really key. There should always be feedback for you.

[00:08:29] So I want to read this quote from a Nielsen Norman Group article, because it says it so perfectly. Quote: "In short, if your user study did not find any issues, something is wrong with your study or with your team. The perfect user interface has not been seen yet, and it's unlikely to make its first appearance in world history during your current project." End quote.

[00:08:45] So what is a question that we can use that can generate feedback in sort of an apparent vacuum, in this moment where you really need feedback but it can be hard to get it? How do you feel about that? Even in a strict usability test with really clear task completion goals, we can uncover like a quantum world by asking open-ended questions about personal experiences.

[00:09:13] So I want you to think about it this way. There is a really huge difference between someone who completes a task in a test with confidence and, separately, someone who completes that same task with anxiety or uncertainty about it. They will have the same apparent behavioral outcome in your test, but their behavior is going to diverge quickly at scale. So as a designer, "how do you", or "how did you feel about that" contextualizes behavior in a way that helps to deepen the insight.

[00:09:41] And you can certainly reword this question, and the other questions we'll talk about, to match your style and context, but I want to encourage you to keep it open-ended and neutral. Do not assume feelings on behalf of the user, like frustration, because you're going to shape their response. Also I encourage you not to ask hypotheticals like "how would you feel", because none of us are very good at predicting our own emotional responses, much less verbalizing them for a stranger on demand.

[00:10:06] If you suspect that there's a deeper insight to be had in a given moment, follow up with more why questions, like why did you feel that way, because your aim is to ask more open-ended questions to draw out more insight without biasing responses. Now obviously this guidance does not minimize the work of research professionals. They are experts in contextualizing questions, guiding conversations without bias. Their collaboration is a gift. Respect their input and craft, learn from them, read books and articles about user research.

[00:10:39] But with that said, this question of "how do you feel about that" can help designers be less afraid of doing research wrong. I, along with many others, would encourage product and web designers especially to be able to design and execute user tests effectively, because that's a really simple way to build that muscle of soliciting feedback, engaging with it curiously.

Receiving feedback from co-workers: can you say more about that?

[00:11:01] So then let's shift to receiving feedback from co-workers and consider a different question for it, because for many of us, asking a co-worker "how do you feel about that" is immediately exhausting just thinking about it. Getting feedback from your team and co-workers can get really messy, because hidden pressures, hidden incentives affect the way that people behave. Group dynamics can be wild on top of that.

[00:11:25] And plus, we're going to acknowledge that in many countries like mine, America, employment is a crucial and really fickle thing. Our livelihoods and families and health care are all tied up in our employment. And on top of that there's a sort of emotional toll that capitalism and other systems like it kind of inflict. On top of that, most of the time we want to keep our jobs, and our ability to keep our job depends on certain people not firing us, and many times those are the people that we need design feedback from. It's a lot.

[00:11:53] We'll talk briefly about self-care and identifying toxicity in a moment, but let's focus in on a question that can help you no matter how healthy the critique currently is, regardless of how public the forum is. Can you say more about that? And you might be thinking, there are many people I never want to ask to say more about anything, and that is fair. But this question is about redirecting energy through curiosity, and it's especially helpful when someone has just communicated really terribly, because you're giving them a new opportunity to reframe or rephrase, or at least to diffuse a tense situation by providing more context.

[00:12:31] And even in a worst case scenario, a poor communicator is going to respond to this question by just doubling down on their original statement, and then you might not learn anything new and you might not be able to parse that feedback any better, but it does add clarity, it helps you move forward. In most cases though, asking this to fellow designers basically invites people into the conversation and gives them permission to express themselves more fully. And any response, from a passive "this design is fine" all the way to "this design is going to fail and I know it", can get more context and clarity when you just ask people to say more.

[00:13:08] And in many ways this is like asking why, but it neutralizes the defensiveness that can come along with just saying why reflexively. Because demanding that others explain themselves or defend their feedback ultimately is not going to create a healthy or fruitful environment for design critique. And yet we need to be able to accept well-intentioned feedback that may not be helpful or applicable in that moment. Remember, we need vulnerability in trusted environments from a diversity of viewpoints. Your design teams and cross-functional co-workers need to see and feel that feedback is welcomed in the right environment, and that not everyone sees and feels in the same way. And so it's important to keep an eye on our own behavior and consider how we might be coming across.

On thick skin, defensiveness and toxicity

[00:13:51] So I actually want to pause for a moment on this topic of being defensive as a designer, especially for the benefit of designers who are earlier in their career engaging this idea, because you've probably heard a fellow designer or an industry leader tell you that you need thick skin so that you can learn to deal with the amount of critique that you're going to receive throughout your career. And designers who went to art schools are especially familiar with this, because it's basically a rite of passage.

[00:14:17] There is a very important and valuable truth in that whole idea. Yes, if a designer appears overly defensive when receiving critique, they are going to discourage other people from giving honest feedback in the future. Those people will either tend to protect your feelings and shield you from harsh criticism, or worse, they're going to just exclude you from conversations based purely on their judgment of your behavior. What I want to be clear about, though, is that developing this thick skin, so to speak, should not mean that you also have to tolerate toxic work environments or harmful communication. Again, we can all be honest, direct and kind all at once.

[00:14:55] So we're going to talk next about how to be all of those things while delivering feedback to others. But I want to make a note here again, especially for early career designers, because this is kind of a lot to handle as part of your job. Pay really close attention when you feel yourself becoming defensive, or when you hear a trusted person tell you that you seem that way, because it's worth investigating that moment after the emotion of it has died down. I want to encourage you to try not to label difficult feedback as toxic too quickly, especially if it's coming from somebody who hasn't shown a pattern of poor communication in the past.

[00:15:30] But with that said, please know that I, like many of you, have been in situations where design leaders or cross-functional partners caused real harm, and design critiques basically platformed their awful behavior. So I have seen my own good intentions and vulnerability weaponized for someone else's benefit, so I promise I'm keeping that in mind. There are absolutely terrible situations that have to be dealt with, and there can be people who should lose their privilege of providing feedback. But it's really important to check in with yourself as you come to this conclusion, and get the input of other safe and trusted co-workers, because sometimes the feedback isn't actually harmful in retrospect so much as it's difficult to process emotionally, for any number of valid reasons. In those situations you need self-care and reflection. Take care of yourself.

Giving design feedback: what do you want feedback on today?

[00:16:23] So I've given you a couple of questions to use when you're receiving design feedback from customers and co-workers. So let's shift now into giving that design feedback, especially in difficult or critical moments of feedback. As a design professional, again I would encourage you to consider that giving design feedback is a really critical skill you're going to need to nurture and develop throughout your whole career. Whether you're an executive, a people leader, an individual contributor, I don't care, you all have to drive, or use feedback to drive, design quality in teams and to help grow the knowledge of designers.

[00:16:58] Now, the feedback you give literally teaches designers how to be better designers, but you're also teaching them how to set up and deliver feedback in that moment. And so what I want to do is give you two key questions for this context, but I'll give you the top one if you only walk away with one. And here's that question, to ask the designer seeking feedback: what do you want feedback on today?

[00:17:25] Let me defend this. Unless the answer to this question is immediately and abundantly clear to you, it is worth asking every single time, because it's way too easy for a designer to pull up a Figma file with a billion frames on a million pages and walk through the design in a group meeting as a way of getting feedback. But sometimes designers are doing that because they actually want to show that they worked really hard, and that can be a valid need, but it's not going to help you get focused feedback on interaction design, for instance.

[00:17:55] When designers are not clearly defining the scope of the discussion, there is too much space for unhelpful tangents and distracting questions from well-meaning people. Counterintuitively, telling a group of people that, quote, any feedback is welcome, is going to draw out subjective opinions, because people are going to struggle to take on the context that this designer has had in their head for weeks or months.

[00:18:19] So you can help your fellow designer by asking them what do you want feedback on today, and give the whole group, or just you, an opportunity to align on the goal of the critique. Because ultimately that goal should be about, like we talked about earlier, rendering user intent for the benefit of business goals, but the actual focus might be a specific interaction. If you don't have an answer to this question, critiques can turn into an unhelpful pile-on.

[00:18:48] So let me give you another question that can come in handy when things do actually become overly negative, or when you're helping a designer who is experiencing a lot of defensiveness. What is working really well in this design? We already said that there is no perfect or ideal design, but the inverse of that doesn't exist either. Every design has aspects of it that are absolutely going in the right direction. So what this question does is it helps the designer highlight what is right about the work, and it helps kind of reopen the discussion with a lighter form of curiosity about it.

Career feedback: what do you see that I might be missing?

[00:19:23] So now let's turn to something more nuanced that I haven't heard discussed nearly as much at design conferences and in design books, and that's feedback on design careers. Product and web design is still relatively new, and we haven't developed industry-wide best practices for advancing in your career, especially as an IC. And yet we need honest and practical feedback on our skills in order to improve and grow, and for that matter we need it to get promoted. Otherwise you end up in a really weird place of subjectivity, with promotions driven primarily by whoever happens to be your boss and whatever their secret incentives are.

[00:20:01] Most of you have probably had at least one experience in your career where the criteria for going further in your career is not clear or actionable. And that's a big gnarly problem that we're not about to solve in this talk. But what we can do together, once again, is deploy a strategic question or two to guide discussion and promote genuine curiosity. So when you have the opportunity to receive feedback on yourself, as it relates to your skills in your career as a designer, here's a question that can help you: what do you see that I might be missing?

[00:20:37] This question helps frame the discussion in a few key ways, hopefully increasing the likelihood of a valuable insight. The first half of this question, "what do you see", frames the conversation as a direct and sincere request. And just being clear with you, you will need to actually be sincere in wanting this feedback in order for this question to work. Sincerity is step zero. But this question, in the first half of it, also frames the request as the opinion it is. You want to hear somebody's point of view. You're not asking them to attempt to describe some sort of objective shared reality.

[00:21:11] The second half of this question, "that I might be missing", can be a helpful constraint for focusing feedback, because it asks the other person to apply some empathy from their end, by considering that you are already a design professional who's likely aware of areas you can improve on. But it also again frames your question as an exchange of unique value, and as this tiny moment of connection and vulnerability that can build trust with the person you're asking, because you are asking for someone's help in seeing something new about yourself from a perspective that only they can provide.

Giving career feedback is a gift

[00:21:49] So I want to carry that vibe over into us giving feedback to others on their skills and their career, because I really want to impress upon you that thoughtful, honest, emotionally aware feedback can be a gift to other people. You can help them become better versions of themselves as humans through encouragement and trust. It is a truly humbling opportunity, and one actual way that you can make the world a better place, specifically and directly.

[00:22:18] Because personally, of all the ways I've invested my time and energy in so-called career growth, focusing on becoming a trusted and safe co-worker, especially for fellow designers, has paid off the most. And it feeds my soul in a different way. Designing websites and widgets can be weird and existentially bleak sometimes. So hearing from someone else that I helped them to think about something differently, or believe in themselves, that's more the real work in my view than anything else that we do.

[00:22:53] But even if that's a little too much for you, even on a baser level, gaining trust with teammates and co-workers is going to give you and your team more context to produce better design work in nearly every situation. It is important to note that trust is built, though, even when those specific people aren't around to hear what you're saying. So again, I just want to make it clear: if you're going to make a statement about somebody else's work or skill set with another person, you should do so with sincerity, intention and kindness regardless of where you are saying it. If you throw shade, it will come back to you and it will destroy this trust that you're trying to build.

What's the best way to give you feedback?

[00:23:29] So when you have an opportunity to deliver feedback to the right person, you can build this trust really quickly, and one question you can use when doing this is: what's the best way to give you feedback? What's cool is this question will work in person and in email and in Slack and text and however else it is that you communicate with people. Part of the magic here is that it gives the other human being a chance to reveal a little bit more about themselves and their emotional state, along with the ways that they feel safest communicating, especially to you.

[00:24:03] And responses to this question can be kind of all over the place in my experience, and that is awesome, because sometimes you learn that people actually want feedback delivered in a one-on-one conversation, because it's hard to interpret things without additional nonverbal cues or the ability to ask clarifying questions. Other times people definitely don't want that, and instead they actually prefer that you write the whole thing down and give them a chance to read it privately, so that they can sit with the feedback and read it multiple times, and not end up using all of their energy processing things and monitoring their reactions to you in real time while they're talking to you. It can be a lot for some people.

[00:24:41] So like our other questions today, these also serve as moments to check in with another person and see if they're needing something that we might be overlooking because of cultural differences or neurodiversity or accessibility needs. Even if they don't have a response at all to this question, you're still building trust, which is awesome. They will remember that you asked this and they might take advantage of it in the future. And because hopefully you are asking this question in some form every single time that you're able to give someone feedback.

[00:25:12] And in fact, to say that really plainly, all of the questions we've talked about today can be repeated every time you enter that context. I have found that some folks are worried that they'll sound kind of mechanical or insincere if other people notice that they're asking the same questions over and over again. I totally get that, I understand that concern. But I can also promise you that if you're being sincere, people will see that. And you can tweak the phrasing, like I said, to sound more natural coming from you, but stay committed to the actual intent and structure of what we've discussed today. Use these questions in each context when you're not sure where to go next, or you're not sure where to begin. And the thing is, if these questions work for you, others are going to take notice and they will eventually try using them too. And this is exactly what we are hoping to do with helpful questions.

Recap and resources

[00:26:02] So thank you so much for hearing me out on this today. It's a real joy and honor to be able to discuss this with you. I care a lot about it and I've gotten really cool feedback on it so far. So again, here are the key contexts and the questions that we discussed. When you're receiving design feedback from users, ask "how do you feel about that". When you're receiving design feedback from co-workers, you're going to ask "can you say more about that". When you're giving design feedback to co-workers, you can ask "what do you want feedback on today". And then especially if you need to diffuse or calm something down a bit, "what's working really well in this design" is a nice reset that can often pipe everything back through a sense of curiosity.

[00:26:51] When you're receiving career feedback from co-workers, you want to ask "what do you see that I might be missing", to get that unique perspective and build trust with somebody. And then when you're given the opportunity to give career feedback to a co-worker, you can ask "what's the best way to give you this feedback", so that you can build trust with somebody in a one-on-one setting and learn how to communicate best with them.

[00:27:16] Now, if what we've talked about today interested you, I want to give you a set of resources that I recommend to dive deeper into some particular key areas that we sort of touched on, but you can go down a rabbit hole for individually. First is Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights, by Steve Portigal. Second is Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, by Kathryn Schulz. Third is Discussing Design: Improving Communication and Collaboration Through Critique, one that I leveraged heavily here and definitely recommend, by Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry. And then Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, life-changing tools for healthy relationships, by Dr Marshall Rosenberg. Some of those tenets are embedded throughout what we talked about today, we just didn't necessarily label them as nonviolent communication. Finally, your licensed therapist is a great resource for you to have further conversation about some of the things we talked about today.

[00:28:12] So I hope that you will keep all this in mind as you grow and you advance in your own design career. I hope you'll embrace the opportunity to give and receive feedback in a thoughtful and a valuable way, and I hope that you'll remember that you can be honest and direct and kind all at once. And so I want to leave you with a final question: how do you feel about that? I'd sincerely love your feedback on what we talked about today, however it is you want to deliver it. Thank you so much for your time.

Q&A

[00:28:44] Host: Thanks Cliff. There are so many questions and we don't have much time to cover them, but I will try and get to even just one question. A lot of people, it brought up a lot of emotions for people, I'm sure that was the intention. The defensive one was a very interesting one. The feedback slides were just phenomenal. And a big question that has come up is, it's really hard to give feedback when people aren't capable of doing the job. That came up in that context more than once. So, when a person isn't good enough, how do you give that feedback?

[00:29:31] Cliff: There's a lot to say about this for sure, and that's a great question. I'll give my best quick summary of how I would approach this. I tend to use something like even the classic ten usability heuristics as a way to reground when I'm trying to have a conversation with somebody about fundamental design concepts, so that we can go back to something that we can talk about and share together, and so that we can get out of the land of me trying to convey to them how I personally think they have some things to learn or to work on.

[00:30:12] Cliff: And I found that even just the usability heuristics, reminding people of basic things like Fitts's law and button size and information hierarchy and visual hierarchy, these are places I can kind of recollect with people, and we can try to figure out, okay, we have to work with this designer, so how do we enable them to be the best designer they can be in this moment, and then how can we keep teaching them over time? It's definitely a tough moment, but personally I view designers as having to be partners with the designer they're having that experience with, and not as somebody who can guide that situation explicitly through critique. I hope that helps.

[00:30:53] Host: Yeah, that's a really, really good answer. And one more: how quickly do you give feedback and get feedback, how often?

[00:31:06] Cliff: Oh, this is a great question. It is different for me every single time, in every moment. Now, that's my personal approach, I'm not necessarily saying everyone has to do it that way. I do enjoy a good ceremony of design review with a team or something like that, so I'll join into that when I can. But I would say that a lot of what I've done, especially, my experience is primarily working at, I started at a startup but now I'm at a very large company, and so that's part of the dynamics at play. I found that the more people that can end up giving feedback, the more thoughtful you have to be about exactly when and how you are asking for that feedback, because you're also responsible for the amount of noise that it creates.

[00:31:51] Cliff: So what I'm not doing is taking a Figma that I just designed yesterday and sending it to 30 people at once. But what I am more likely to do, for instance, is scaffold it out to a handful of people at a time based on their level of expertise and the type of feedback I want, and I try to broaden the circle over time, as opposed to sending to discrete groups or sending to a big group all at once. That at least helps me to keep the feedback kind of directional, and helps me make sure also that I'm hearing from everybody that I'm asking for feedback.

[00:32:23] Host: Yeah, I really love that answer. It makes a lot of sense, because noise is something that I think all teams struggle with and trying to reduce. Cliff, that was fantastic, loved it. I'm sure there'll be lots of people rewatching your talk. I think I screenshotted four or five of your questions, and thank you for all the resources, that was another question too. Your presentation will be available online for people to watch and share, and thank you, enjoy the rest of your day.

[00:32:52] Cliff: Awesome, thank you.