Keep an open mind and heart about your evolving designs. Reach out for peer feedback often. Don’t fear what you will hear in your peers’ review. You can choose to act on their input, or not. Some review items might prove themselves handy later on in the design process. Always make yourself to stay open to your peers’ input.

How to have positive and valuable UX design critiques

The key lies in our peers’ energy and generosity

Design critiques are often feared. We think of critiques as critical, cruel, and gruelling evaluations of our treasured design ideas. We worked so hard to get to this design stage, and we’re not keen on potential design negativity.

Design critiques are perceived as something to avoid, and even more so, to not ever integrate them into our design thinking, ideation, and prototyping process.

However, design critiques are UX designers’ secret and reliable source for building a strong product.

Fear not, there are ways to plan design critiques so that feedback gathered during a critique can propel our designs forward in super-successful ways.

Tapping into a few design critique principles, we’ll be able to gather valuable insights from our peers, collect fresh points-of-view, and maybe even find much needed motivation to move forward.

Create a safe and open space for peer review communication

Peer design critiques are different from user research. Design critiques focus on your design in progress, based on received research data.