Giving, seeking, and receiving feedback in UX
By: Meltem Barcelona
Tags: Feedback, Design, Teamwork, UX Research, UX

Giving, seeking, and receiving feedback in UX

Each individual is a universe of its own and each company or UX department has a set of unwritten rules. When you’re in doubt, the following checklist can guide you as you start navigating the muddy waters of the feedback world. Meltem Barcelona Aug 29·9 min read

Types of feedback depicted as different types of cookies by Liz Fosslien

3 weeks after joining Glovo, I saw a message in a Slack channel that’s exclusively created for seeking feedback amongst the UX Research team. Two of my colleagues were asking for input to their work for co-creating the product vision (see our case study HERE by our brilliant Valentina Salvi and Mariana Itza de Miguel).

Excited about this project, and keen to contribute to its quality standards by checking for consistency, accuracy, and simplicity, I posted my comments on the Miro board.

Hours after I submitted my feedback, Mariana told me that some parts of my feedback were located in sections(s) that were drafted by Joana, our Product Director (the head of Product Managers for Glovo customer app).

That was unexpected. My comments were respectful, but were they a bit too direct? Have I risked my job, soon after my arrival to a new company, by giving feedback to someone who was way more senior than me?

Luckily, Joana was unperturbed. She genuinely considered all my feedback, iterated on some details, and kept others while giving me her reasoning.

It was one of those occasions — still rare in UX & Product teams according to my experience — where the feedback was given openly, received with curiosity, and helped serve for better outcomes. But you and I both know that we’re not always that lucky.

🙈 What can go wrong?

In the field of UX, there still seems to be fear when giving constructive feedback:

“What if they think I’m stupid for raising this point?”

“What if my colleague gets offended?”

“What if our relationship/collaboration gets broken after I openly give feedback?

Similarly, seeking feedback can be scary because we don’t know what kind of reactions we will get

“What if my colleagues don’t like my work?”

“What if I get humiliated if it shows that I don’t know something well enough?”

“What if I get too many comments and I have to re-do the work?”

“What if my feedback request gets ignored?”

Finally, receiving feedback can be a challenge of its own.

“What am I supposed to say if I don’t agree with the feedback?”

“Will I have to apply all the feedback?”

“If I reject the feedback, will it hurt my relationship with my colleague(s)?”

All these concerns are legitimate. If they weren’t, I wouldn’t be writing this article. While each individual and situation is unique and needs your close attention, you can still start off with the following checklist to help navigate feedback’s muddy waters.

Establish the context

Most companies and UX departments seem to try generating a feedback culture. As Julie Zhuo (ex VP of Product Design at Facebook and the author of The Making of a Manager) recently posted on LinkedIn, feedback —especially if people show their work early and often — helps to get to a good outcome faster. It also improves the processing of the learning experience, and amongst other things, improves trust.

But it doesn’t mean that everybody is equally open to give or receive feedback. When you’re in doubt, and when you don’t have it clear that your audience might not take it the right way, ask yourself the following questions:

What’s your relationship with the person who is the recipient/giver of the feedback? Do you know them? Have you established a relationship with them based on trust? (e.g., Are you their manager or are you managed by them? Do you have the same domain expertise as them?). It’s not the same if you are the design lead giving feedback to your direct report. Or you are a UX Researcher giving feedback to the presentation of a data analyst with whom you collaborate. Each relationship has its unique characteristics, and it serves to be mindful of the nuances when giving feedback.

(e.g., Are you their manager or are you managed by them? Do you have the same domain expertise as them?). It’s not the same if you are the design lead giving feedback to your direct report. Or you are a UX Researcher giving feedback to the presentation of a data analyst with whom you collaborate. Each relationship has its unique characteristics, and it serves to be mindful of the nuances when giving feedback. Have you set common expectations with them? (e.g., Do they expect to give/receive feedback? Have you established the boundaries of feedback? (e.g., task-based such as upon evaluation of a research report; values-based such as one’s degree of proactivity to do teamwork, etc) Do you have an established frequency of feedback that both parties are committed to? (e.g., weeklies, upon each deliverable, etc).

(e.g., Do they expect to give/receive feedback? (e.g., task-based such as upon evaluation of a research report; values-based such as one’s degree of proactivity to do teamwork, etc) (e.g., weeklies, upon each deliverable, etc). Are you working towards a common goal? Do you both care about that goal? (e.g., Do you have established OKRs? Have you built a common understanding of what a good result looks like)?

Understand the other person

As we discussed earlier, people are complex and there is no limit to how well we can understand one another. That said, when it comes to feedback, there seems to be a key matter when understanding the other person:

Do they tend to have a fixed or growth mindset?

A list of characteristics for both fixed and growth mindset by Michelle Lee

The book “Mindset” by Carol Dweck goes deeper into explaining the underlying reasoning behind this mindset study. As a quick summary, in her medium article, Julie Zhuo explains this:

“A fixed mindset presumes that what you are capable of today is how capable you really are, which means every time you get critical feedback, you read it as a judgement on your person. Hey, this thing you did isn’t great gets translated to *I’m* not great. A growth mindset presumes that no matter where you are now, you can improve. If you believe that, then whenever someone tells you, Hey, this thing you did isn’t great, you think, Okay, that feedback was useful and it’ll help me do better next time. With a growth mindset, you start to crave feedback from as many people as possible, even critical feedback, because you realize it’s the fastest way for you to learn and improve.”

Of course, how someone is feeling on a certain day (e.g., if they’re tired, feeling sick, anxious, have relationship problems, or quite the contrary if they are feeling happy and energetic) would play a role in their degree of openness to feedback. Still, childhood experiences, genetic factors, and earlier professional experiences could color if a UX Professional or a member of the product team tends to learn from or ignores feedback (e.g., leaning more towards a growth mindset or fixed mindset).

When you’re in a “feedback relationship” with a colleague (e.g., could be your direct report or your manager, from the same department or another discipline), your job is relatively easier when they manifest with their words and actions that they have a growth mindset. They would actively give you feedback to help you improve your work or receive your feedback with genuine curiosity.

But if a UX colleague of yours — whether for earlier experiences, external factors, or deeply embedded assumptions — is manifesting more fixed mindset-like tendencies, then it’s important that you:

give more time for your feedback to be properly delivered, and digested

have more patience with yourself and your colleague throughout the process, and check out the next steps.

Adjust your tone, language, and communication style

In principle, it’s recommended to have a face-to-face talk over a Zoom call or a zoom call over an email or slack message. That said, I know people who truly feel uncomfortable about face-to-face conversations (e.g., they might be shy) and they have a harder time reacting on a call. For those colleagues, it might be way easier to exchange written words than to talk.

No matter where you find yourself in the feedback-oriented conversation, it’s important that you give it a try to adjusting your communication style to the other person. Are they “feelers” that express themselves with emotions? Are they more technical and reserved? What kind of frequency works the best for them?

It’s valuable to reflect on the questions above. And remember:

The feedback is only as valuable as it translates to positive outcomes.

BEST communications styles workshop slide by Patricia D Robinson. The y-axis is for the level of directness in the communication. The x-axis shows if a person geares towards being a thinker or a feeler.

We might hope that the only thing that should matter is the content of our feedback. But the truth is that the communication style is the deal-breaker in terms of how and if the feedback would be given or received. It’s worthwhile to be mindful of matching our communication style to our colleague as much as possible.

Giving space

For upbeat people filled with energy and immediacy, this point could be the hardest even if it literally involves doing nothing. No matter if your feedback is task-oriented (e.g., on the tangible details of an assignment) or behavioral (e.g., how a deadline is handled, how a problem is solved), it will still require your recipient or your feedback-provider time to reflect on the matter, digest the interaction, and come up with an action plan. Even after the action plan is in place, it’s important that you provide the time and space to calmly work on the areas of growth without placing extra pressure.

Note, however, that giving space is not about letting go of the whole matter and forgetting about it. If you’re committed to the development (e.g., your growth, the growth of others, or the project/teamwork in general), you do need to keep the feedback in your backlog and keep referring to it until its content is no longer relevant.

If feedback doesn’t work no matter what, try other methods

Remember that at the end, feedback is a gift. Once you give it, it’s on the other person to decide what to do with it. Likewise, as a professional committed to her development, all you can do is to ask for feedback and keenly observe the outcomes.

That said, in the hardest of all situations, the feedback mechanism might not work no matter how hard you try. That’s when it’s worthwhile to give evidence-based coaching a try.

As we discussed earlier in the “What can go wrong?” section, there could be a lot of fear involved especially when receiving constructive feedback. As Dave Bailey puts it in his article:

“When people receive feedback, they can instinctively interpret it as a threat, triggering a defensive response (also known as fight or flight). Scientists have discovered that once this response is active, learning is inhibited. In other words, constructive feedback may prevent people from learning.”

So instead of giving feedback straightaway, whatever “cookie” type you might be choosing, you can work on ‘unblocking’ the narrowest part of the pipeline shown below.

Image from Evidence-Based Coaching Handbook by David B. Peterson (2006)

How can we do that? By helping the person reflect on their goals and success factors. Ask them a lot of non-judgemental, simple questions with genuine curiosity. Examples could be along the lines of:

“Could you help me understand how you make sense of X in relation to Y?”

“I’m struggling to see how X works according to your POV. Could you walk me through your thought process?”

And have these open conversations potentially help them to rethink their way of thinking, and compassionately challenge the status quo.

Does this method work quickly? Not at all. But it's much more likely to work than force-feeding feedback when it’s simply not working out for a person.

In a nutshell, a significant part of our work in the field of UX involves giving as well as receiving feedback from our team or the teams that we collaborate with (e.g., data scientists, product managers, etc). While some situations can be easy, others require exhaustive preparation to generate desired outcomes. Establishing the context, understanding the other person, adjusting our tone & communication style, and giving space could help make our engagement both more pleasurable and successful. If we notice that feedback as a method doesn’t work particularly well, we can borrow from other methods such as coaching to improve its outcomes.

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