At LendingClub, not long after I became part of the design team, I recognized the potential for improvement in our weekly design critique sessions. Done well, they can improve the collective quality of each team member’s work by leveraging different specialities and make the team feel closer and psychologically safer, thus working better together.
Year
2023
Role
Design Operations Lead
Company
LendingClub
Timeline
6 months
Team
Head of Design
Design Manager
Challenge
The existing format lacked structure and incentive for folks to volunteer to participate. As a result, the attendance dropped significantly and the team lost one of the only opportunities for the designers to seek feedback and communicate project updates. In addition, there was room to enhance feedback quality, overall efficiency, and delightfulness. Motivated by a commitment to continuous improvement, I took the initiative to redesign the design critique process.
How might we
Objectives
Promote Engagement: Encourage active participation and engagement from all team members, regardless of experience levels. Create a sense of community in a hybrid work environment.
Optimize Time Management: Streamline the critique process to ensure efficient use of time without compromising the depth of discussions.
Elevate Feedback Quality: Establish a framework for providing constructive and actionable feedback.
Enhance Communication: Foster more open communication on project updates among team members to reduce silos and create channels for collaboration.
Initial Exploration
When I first set my mind on redesigning the design critique, I wanted to simply make it fun to join. Over the past year, I started to notice that the design team members not consistently joining the weekly meeting and several factors may have contributed to it, including 1) team members may have conflicting schedules, leading to difficulties in attending the designated meeting time, 2) heavy workloads or pressing deadlines might deter team members from participating in the critique sessions, 3) team members may perceive the critique meetings as unengaging or irrelevant to their work, and 4) ineffective meeting format not conducive to open discussions or constructive feedback on top of the challenges remote work environment presents.
While I couldn’t change the remote work environment or control the amount of workload we received as a team, I wanted to bring more structure to the meeting to allow more engagement and efficient outcomes by focusing on a few areas of improvement. In October 2022, I tested the water to see if the team is open to bringing changes to the current design crit and received positive feedback.
Narrowing Scope
At the beginning of 2023, after tinkering with adding team bonding element and structuring the critique to 2-3 projects per meeting, I recognized key needs of the current critique session and conducted one-on-one informal discussions with team members to gather insights and validate observed pain points. The challenges are:
Lack of structure in terms of time and format
Varying levels of participation and engagement during critiques
Not conducive to getting all voices on the team heard
After researching best practices through reading blog posts on design critiques at Figma and Nielsen Norman Group, and books like Discussing Design, I proposed another iteration of the critique in June to address the challenges that focused on the following solutions:
Assess the meeting format, structure, and content. Ensure that the critique sessions are engaging, relevant, and provide actionable insights.
Clearly outline expectations for team members regarding their participation in critique meetings.
Foster a culture where everyone feels encouraged to share their thoughts and insights.
And lastly, establish a feedback loop to gather insights from team members about the design critique meetings.
First, I set up the design critique from presenting directly from designer’s personal Figma file with no central platform to hosting on FigJam, a more interactive platform that allows all team members to “be in the same room at once” to promote engagement. To support a more inclusive environment for all team members to feel encouraged to make their design better, the critique-givers are confident they were heard and understood, and the critique-receivers are confident they can take action on what they received, I introduced hybrid silent/verbal feedback format to allow reactions to be fully developed and translated into constructive feedback. Each week, the projects that get to receive feedback weren’t just the ones that were volunteered by the designers themselves, instead, they followed a predetermined schedule to allow an equitable environment.
Feedback Seeking
In September 2023, about a quarter after the first iteration was implemented, in the spirit of regularly soliciting feedback on meeting effectiveness, relevance, and areas for improvement, I wanted to see how the format was serving the greater needs of the design team and find more ways to improve this ritual further. I sent out a pulse check survey to the team that evaluates the meeting format, effectiveness of feedback, and overall satisfaction.
In September 2023, about a quarter after the first iteration was implemented, in the spirit of regularly soliciting feedback on meeting effectiveness, relevance, and areas for improvement, I wanted to see how the format was serving the greater needs of the design team and find more ways to improve this ritual further. I sent out a pulse check survey to the team that evaluates the meeting format, effectiveness of feedback, and overall satisfaction.
Overall, the team liked the current cadence of the crit, as well as the silent feedback format. But they weren’t unblocking problems or helping folks prepare for more senior level feedback meeting. Some things the team wanted to improve on include:
Problems were too complex for a short time frame. 1-2 projects per week are optimal
The “ask”s of the project weren’t specific enough to receive adequate feedback
Presenters found it difficult to structure their “ask” without a detailed template
The assigned structure didn’t always work for folks
Some nice to haves:
More research related sessions
More help on preparation for stakeholder presentation
Collaboration with teammates. Maybe pairing critiques
More time, or a different dedicated time for kudos/recognition and knowledge sharing
Design Crit 2.0
Results
The new format of crit meeting was able to reduce meeting inefficiency and improve team engagement and crit participation rate. The team was happy about the outcome and felt like there was more opportunity for team bonding and learning about each other's work.
100%
+30%
-40%
“ I feel the design crits are super helpful, both interms of gathering feedback on designs but also in terms of developing closeness within the team. ”
John Mark
Head of Design | LendingClub
Conclusion
This was an incredibly rewarding and fun project to work on. It started out as someone who was newest to the design team wanting to make the design crit more helpful for me to grow as a design, then gradually paved my path into learning about design operations as a whole, which inspired other projects like rethinking design-dev handoff, file documentation, design system maintenance, etc.
Moving forward, the lessons learned from redesigning the design critique process will undoubtedly inform my approach to future design operations projects. It has ignited a passion for creating environments that not only support effective design work but also nurture a culture of collaboration, learning, and continuous improvement within the team and across the organization. This project has been a pivotal milestone in my journey as a designer and a design operations enthusiast.
Previously crafting the future of banking and leading design ops at LendingClub, I'm currently open to new opportunities.
