How Not to Ruin your Design Review

 

Take care of your valuables!

We’ve all been there. The Dev team has worked really hard to nail down a search results page they think will really help users. You pull up your slide deck and start walking the stakeholders through it.

“Okay, here’s what the user sees after they log in,” you say to the assembled throng. It’s good to start with the familiar, you’ve heard.

“Wait, that’s not the right time zone,” the VP of marketing points out.

“This is just fake data,” you say, hoping to get back on track quickly.

“Nobody has that many books on their shelf. Why are you showing so many books?”

“Lots of our users have really large shelves,” you stammer. “But we’re not reviewing the book shelf design right now.”

“I don’t like that font. Why is it so blocky?”

And on, and on.

What happened?

(A side note: I have committed EVERY ONE of these mistakes. And I hope you can learn from my errors!)

Remember to Begin Before You Start

Prep is everything in a meeting like this. If you don’t have time to prep, you don’t have time to have the meeting — you’re just wasting N peoples’ time.

Some specific prep things to think about:

Don’t Just Throw Wireframes up there

Set the scene. Even if “everybody” knows the situation, quickly summarize who the user is and what their goal is. This can be a single sentence! If you’ve got established personas, use those: “Ricky, our romance reader, is trying to find a new book to read by one of his favorite authors. Recall that Ricky uses the site weekly, and has hundreds of titles in their to-read pile.”

We’re all so busy. It’s impossible to prep people in meetings, you say. I had 6 design reviews today alone!

Well, that sucks. And it might say something about your workplace. But 3 super-productive design reviews, with a few minutes for audience prep ahead of time, and a solid half-hour afterwards, are better than 6 abbreviated ones. There’ll be less rework and deeper insights.

So budget your time appropriately, and help people understand context before they jump into your design review.

If you don’t build up context and give some user background, reviewers often simply overlay their own experience on whatever you’re presenting. You’ll get their knee-jerk reaction, or end up bike-shedding, instead of getting valuable design input.

Trim What You Don’t Want To Talk About

You cut and paste that thing from the old mockup, but it’s okay, people will just ignore it, right? Also, you show the drop-down menu both closed and open so the developers can see what it looks like; pile ’em all together in a heap!

Except — no. We’re all human, and design reviewers are already at a disadvantage, because they haven’t lived with the design while you’ve been working on it.

At best, they’re coming in largely blank — at worst, they have the old version, or a dozen old versions, floating around in their head fighting for dominance. So help those squishy human brains to focus on the relevant piece. Take the extra time to trim out things you don’t want to talk about.

If you’re exploring search that day, aggressively blur out the rest of the page. Or put a big gray X, labeled “USER’S SHELF”, over that section. A big gray box, with the right voice-over, is totally fine if you want your audience to focus elsewhere.

A big grey X, you say? That’ll ruin the aesthetic! Well, yes. And make it abundantly clear you are not talking about aesthetics right now. Make it unmistakably ugly, and as clearly labeled as the devices in the Bat Cave circa 1967. Bat-Login-Page. Bat-Bookshelf. Bat-not-what-we’re-reviewing-today.

2. Craft Your Presentation

Hey, look, it’s more work! This time, the work is crafting the content of the presentation to shine a light on the part you are discussing, and help people avoid being tripped up by inconsistencies, irrelevancies, or trivialities.

Show Your Design How Users Will Use it

It’s tempting to show every possible state. Developers often ask for it. And it saves time — just throw that extra state onto the same slide! But it’s harmful to getting feedback on the design. Instead, do a little extra work so you can get the best feedback from your reviewers.

Most of us are familiar with style sheets, and it’s tempting to do something like that with mockups. These have a different audience and purpose.