Feedback processes are crucial for a company's success and are highly appreciated in healthy work cultures. How can you develop your skills and measure your work's progress, if there is no one on the other side to discuss your solutions with?

Product Designers must acknowledge the importance of feedback, since one of the core parts of their jobs is to design for people, and without their insights about the products, we would feel lost in the desert. If you’re a designer spending several hours around a product, you tend to develop a biased perspective of your work. That perspective often needs to be balanced with alternative ways of thinking.

Naturally, feedback has multiple nuances and needs to be strategic for designers to thrive with their solutions. It's essential to learn when to commit, and commitment can sometimes lead to feelings of frustration, almost like you’re running a battle against yourself and those around you.

Obviously, at Pixelmatters, we don't want you to feel overruled by the feedback process. We aim for a solid process with different steps, where clear communication and transparency are the keys to helping feedback dynamics to grow in the right direction. Our goal is not to turn processes into painful experiences but to guarantee they will take designs to the next level while allowing you to grow professionally. Curious to know how? Let me tell you more.

Breaking down the steps

Here are some guidelines for giving and receiving feedback that will make you happy and excited about your work:

Relationship between the team

First things first: When communicating a message, there is always a sender and a receiver. Successful communication happens when the receiver understands the purpose of the message, which might seem obvious but often fails.

In feedback sessions, every participant plays an essential role as a facilitator, ensuring the message is conveniently transmitted. The person asking for feedback should be clear about their needs, while the person giving feedback should share a line of thought respectful of the design needs.

Justifying your thought process is the best way to improve your credibility and confidence toward the other side. On top of that, successful communication deeply impacts feedback efficiency — it reduces the chances of working on a design that might have significant flaws.

Settle a foundation of trust

Trust is a core value in flourishing cultures and a two-way street to foster collaboration — in trust, you will also find the comfort of empowering your inner voice. Being poorly judged about your work is a real fear because it might affect your confidence, and our goal with the feedback is the opposite. Trust can’t be built without a constructive mindset. One can learn a constructive mindset, which is usually related to perspective. And, by perspective, I mean the way we look at things. Let me give you an example:

I once read a fascinating book that, even though not related to this blog post, helped me get to know some real-life examples of how trust can have an enormous weight over your project outcomes.

The book is called “How to Deal with Friends and Influence People,” Dale Carnegie’s long-time best-seller, and tells a bunch of interesting stories, amongst them one related to Bob Hoover, the famous test pilot.

Hoover flew an airplane during the Second World War, and both engines failed in the air. Fortunately, he could land, and just as he suspected, the plane had been fuelled with jet fuel instead of gasoline. That was a mistake. When confronting the mechanic who committed such a terrible mistake, Hoover said: “To show you I’m sure that you’ll never do this again, I want you to service my F-51 tomorrow.”

Hoover didn’t even criticize the mechanic, as one could expect. Instead, he gave him another opportunity. He just knew that with that second chance, it was very unlikely he would commit the same mistake again.

This is the type of constructive approach you want to follow in your life and work when offering guidance to someone. You will also appreciate it when you’re on the other side. Everyone makes mistakes, and the important thing is how we learn from them. However, learning is strongly connected with our surroundings: if we feel we belong anywhere safe, our motivation to grow increases. If our motivation increases, the quality of our work will be a natural consequence.