UIEtips: Goods, Bads, and Dailies – Lessons for Conducting Great Critiques

Jared Spool

By Jared Spool

October 3rd, 2012

In today’s UIEtips, I explain how child magicians and Pixar Media have mastered critique and how you can incorporate this into your design process. Here’s an excerpt from the article.

Giving the presenter a chance to show their work without being interrupted by a string of questions turns out to be pretty important. After seeing the Chosen Ones in action, I immediately noticed how, in my design reviews, disruptive interruptions can be. It throws the presenter off and doesn’t give them a chance to tell their story about the design and what they’re trying to accomplish.

There are four roles in any critique session. The two everyone’s most familiar with are the presenter and the audience (also sometimes called the critics). However, every session also needs a facilitator and a recorder.

Read the full article, Goods, Bads, and Dailies – Lessons for Conducting Great Critiques

Improve your critique abilities

Make sure your organization is getting the most from great critiques. Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry will show you how in their UI17 Workshop, Leading Design Studios and Collaborative Critiques. Don’t miss it.

How do you give critique. We’d love to hear about your process below.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Critique, UI17 . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

3 Responses to “UIEtips: Goods, Bads, and Dailies – Lessons for Conducting Great Critiques”

  1. Johan Says:
    October 9th, 2012 at 4:36 am

    It seems like Motown used a similar method of regular critiques:

    Each writing/producing team was required to come up with 5 new songs per day. To accomplish this, there was a large area with a lot of little rooms, each with a piano and tape recorder.
    Each team submitted their “5 best” at a weekly production meeting.
    Each team got approval to record the best two of their submissions.
    Usually, only one of the two tunes would emerge complete from the recording process.
    Each finished tune was mixed (with about 15 different mixes by several people).
    Each finished mix was turned into an actual record.
    The Quality Control department listened to each record and picked out the “A” side that was released and promoted.

    Process Tips from Hitsville

  2. Johan Says:
    October 9th, 2012 at 4:36 am

    That was supposed to be a link, but it seems like it was swallowed by the comment system:
    http://madhatted.com/2012/10/8/process-tips-from-hitsville

  3. Joakim Isaksson Says:
    October 12th, 2012 at 5:00 am

    We have a similar process in place for our software development. Due to the extensive scope of our work, our sessions are weekly, and consists of UX presenting to the rest of the team. This allows us to get quick feedback from both developers from a technical perspective and from business stakeholders from a business perspective. I really like the goods and bads technique as well as the no interruption during “performance” rule. Will see if we can incorporate that.

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