Tanner Christensen is a product designer at Facebook, and while his post describes what he’s learned about effectively holding design critique sessions, it’s quite applicable to other areas of work.
If you are in a team environment, adopting a clear and detailed plan for organized critique could be beneficial. Tanner lays it out in four primary steps:
- Establish clear roles: where there is a defined presenter, audience, and facilitator.
- Ensure everyone understands and agrees on the problem that’s being worked on.
- The audience should focus on feedback, not criticism.
- Remove distractions (like phones, and ironically, Facebook).
He notes that he’s done design critique sessions at past jobs, but in this clearly defined environment, he’s found them to be much more useful than before. If you regularly do problem solving in your job, this is a great post to read and see how a huge company like Facebook is managing these kinds of things. I think it could translate really well to web development.
