I’ve been thinking about product feedback. We do alot of it at Jive, since most of our work happens in the open. It’s one of my favorite things about Jive and I wouldn’t change it for the world. We all want to make the best product possible, and you can only get that if you put everyone’s heads together.

So I’ve been thinking about how we can make sure we give each other good feedback. I went back and reviewed some of the things I’ve learned over the years about what makes product feedback useful. I wanted to share three articles in particular that have been really helpful to me. I’m going to try to use these techniques more, and I invite you to join in.

First, Mike Monteiro wrote a great post called How To Give Better Design Feedback (it’s now mysteriously gone from the internet, but I managed to resurrect a copy from my Pinboard archive and post it on Evernote). This part, in particular, is a great point to remember:

First rule of design feedback: what you’re looking at is not art. It’s not even close. It’s a business tool in the making and should be looked at objectively like any other business tool you work with. The right question is not, “Do I like it?” but “Does this meet our goals?” If it’s blue, don’t ask yourself whether you like blue. Ask yourself if blue is going to help you sell sprockets. Better yet: ask your design team. You just wrote your first feedback question.

Cemre Güngör’s How to give better product feedback is also a great article to go through, and this is some good advice:

Describe objectively what you expected and what the product delivered (or fail to deliver). Speak about your particular experience “I got confused when I used this…” instead of generalizing “This is confusing…” or speaking of hypothetical user-beings “Users will get confused…”. This should help disarm the team and empathize.

The worst kind of generalizations speak on behalf of the whole wide world: “Nobody will like/use this”. Being dramatic is unlikely to make the product team start thinking about their work in a new context and change their ways.

But my favorite article on this, because it provides such a great framework for feedback, is Jared Spool’s Moving from Critical Review to Critique. The whole thing is fantastic, and it goes over how to structure a good review. Here’s the gist:

What makes a critique different from a critical design review is we are not there to find flaws. We’re there to learn from the design and to explore where it works well and where it could be improved.

In a well-run critique, we explicitly separate out the discussion of “What are we trying to do with this design?” from the discussion of “Does this rendition accomplish it?” By separating out these two pieces, we avoid digging into the designer’s work just because they unaware of a critical requirement or need.

This part is particularly effective:

The audience also now can explore the design. Often this is done, not with critical commentary, but with exploratory questions. “Have you thought about how users will share the photos with their friends?” “Have you considered how the application works when there’s no network connectivity?”

By posing their thoughts as questions, the designer can say whether they’d thought about that issue or not. If they have, it gives them a nice chance to talk about their thinking. If they haven’t, well, they just say, “No, hadn’t thought about that yet.”

If you have any other tips on giving good feedback, please let me know!