The ritual
You know the format. A designer presents their work on screen. The room offers feedback. Some of it is useful. Most of it is aesthetic preference disguised as design critique. The loudest voice or the most senior person's opinion wins. Everyone leaves feeling like something happened.
Nothing happened.
This is how most design reviews work, and it is a waste of everyone's time.
What goes wrong
1. No clear question.
The designer presents "the design" without specifying what feedback they need. Are we evaluating the information architecture? The interaction model? The visual treatment? Without a clear question, reviewers default to whatever catches their eye. The result is scattered, unfocused feedback that helps no one.
2. Wrong audience.
Design reviews often include too many people, most of whom lack the context to give useful feedback. A VP who has not spoken to an operator in six months should not be weighing in on task flow design. Conversely, the engineer who will build this — and who understands the technical constraints — is often not in the room.
3. Consensus as goal.
The implicit objective of most reviews is to reach agreement. This is backwards. The goal should be to surface risks and make decisions. Disagreement is valuable if it reveals something the designer had not considered. Agreement for its own sake produces mediocre, committee-designed work.
4. Pixel focus, system blindness.
Reviews tend to zoom in on what is visible: colors, spacing, copy. They rarely zoom out to ask systemic questions: Does this pattern scale? Is this consistent with how we handle similar states elsewhere? What happens when this breaks?
How to fix them
I have restructured our design reviews around a few principles:
- The designer sets the question. Every review starts with: "I need feedback on X. Please do not give feedback on Y — that is not what we are solving today."
- Small, relevant audience. Maximum five people. At least one engineer. At least one person with domain expertise. No tourists.
- Written pre-read. The design is shared in advance with context. Review time is for discussion, not presentation.
- Decisions are documented. Every review ends with explicit decisions and open questions. If a review does not produce decisions, it was a meeting, not a review.
A design review should feel like a working session, not a performance.
The culture underneath
Fixing the format is not enough. The deeper issue is whether your team has a culture of honest, specific critique. If people are afraid to say "this does not work because..." then no format will save you.
Build the culture first. The process follows.