The Art of Design Critique

Design critique is the most valuable learning and quality-improvement tool a design team has, yet most teams do it poorly. Bad critique devolves into subjective opinions ('I don't like the blue'), personal attacks ('this looks amateurish'), or design-by-committee where everyone adds their preference until the work is a compromised mess. Good critique evaluates work against stated objectives, identifies what's working and why, pinpoints what isn't working and why, and suggests directions (not solutions) for improvement. Jared Spool argues that the quality of a team's critique practice is the single best predictor of their design quality.