- For most of the reading of the book there was a theme that with any and all forms of critiques it is going to take practice. To know when to have critiques, how many to have and what to say in them all depends on the project and the time frame for the project. For most to all projects it’s important to keep in mind how to give feedback and when. Sometimes people may not want feedback in that moment or maybe not at all. Also you have to really make sure you are listening and processing what the person is presenting. If you get confused you can ask questions but do not start every question with “why..” so you don’t sound like you’re attacking them. There are going to be many times where critiques may be uncomfortable for others and you but everyone has experienced that. Some ideas may not come across clearly so it’s good to just not assume and to ask questions to help clarify the situation. Overall this book covered a lot but I mostly learned that this all takes practice and with practice things will start to become more comfortable and it will get better. This all will help me as a designer in the long run with teaching me how to have proper critiques and how to deal with the bad ones. It was nice to read that even experienced designers had to work through the uncomfortable process and being able to overcome that with critiques.
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https://www.amazon.com/Discussing-Design-Improving-Communication-Collaboration/dp/149190240X
3. For our team’s critique we mostly would make sure to meet up before every major deadline. We wanted to make sure we were both on the same page of how we wanted our app to be designed. We would either get feedback from each other or would get feedback from the professor. With all the feedback we got we would then go back, adjust the project and then present it again with the changes. Feedback was extremely important when we were in the beginning stages of making our apps. We wanted a lot of user feedback because we wanted to make sure the app was usable. Gaining all this feedback helps us see where certain functions may not work or if something was missing from the experience.
4. For starters going in with what we want to accomplish and what we wanted to be improved with the app in critiques. This would have helped give us direction and would have helped keep us on course with our personal deadlines. Another one would be to make sure we set times aside for critiques. It was a lot of just back and forth texting and I feel those critique times would have really helped our process.
5. A time when I received difficult feedback was when we did really early user testing. We wanted to do testing this early so we could see how well our app really was and if it needed to be fixed. I thought all the features made sense and the layout of them worked well but users struggled using it. We had to create a mobile version of a problem we chose and my group chose housing. We wanted to create an app for students to be able to find affordable and convenient housing. When we gave users one of the iterations to use I was surprised that they did not respond to certain features as well as I would want them to. At first I was frustrated because I worked hard on it and tested it and was confused why users were not responding well. I then realized this is just the design process and collected all the feedback of what was going right and what was wrong. After getting all the feedback we went back and edited the whole experience. Because of doing this it made the app more user friendly and was able to give us insight on what was missing in the app itself. Because of feedback we were able to improve our app for the better.
Kayleen Lawson 