Learn to Critique Your Own Designs for Saving Time & Better Results

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Learn to Critique Your Own Designs for Saving Time & Better Results

  • 29 Oct 2015
According to Clark Wimberly, there are ways through which you can get the vital feedback as you design. In addition to the design critique, there are some things which are more stressful. From the viewpoints, pressures, overall tight products and action items, those all things which you need to take care of.

Designing of website and user interfaces requires continuous collaboration with the client and critiques to get their viewpoints and reviews. Without a team who can provide a feedback, it becomes difficult for people to navigate in the dark. However, if you are working on your own or don’t have the privilege of working with a critique at your end, you can become your own design critique.

Staying with the Current Trends

One of the favorite places for digging up inspiration is Dribble, a great platform for the show and tell of social networks for the designers. Even though the Dribble work is nice, it would benefit you if you look closely at the user. For learning more about designing, you can follow the designers on Twitter, check their blog and look at the agency’s portfolio.

A great thumb rule about designing is knowing and remembering when you love a certain design. You need to understand the underlying the design math’s as this would help you in the conversion trend.

Considering the Questions

Don’t dive too deeply into an explanation. You can use the words to fix a shortcoming, but you need to fix it with the design.  This would go a long way with the users and the clients.  So what you need to do is to ask your clients the questions the first time they design, thinking of the ways for avoiding the questions that usually comes with the designer’s way.

When it comes to working on the project alone, you need to make a boundary for an imaginary presentation. It would take only about 5 minutes, showing the areas of work which need extra explanation. When ready to go back to work, you would know which areas to target.

What’s more important than getting into your client’s head is to get into the head of the client’s customer. In other words, it’s called user experience.

Considering the Users

One of the favorite time-tested UX methods is to imagine the persons using the products. You need to put yourself in their shoes to see the things which they might have missed. You need to know that not all projects have the time and budget for going deep with various storyboards and personas. When it comes to flying solo, you need to collect a go-to-set of personas. There are a varied set of users that you carry with you from project to project.

My quick persona set includes some of my family members, since I've had the benefit of watching them interact with tech for years. Even better: it's a seriously varied crowd, as any good persona set should be.

The quick persona set can be your family. Even if they are in different fields, you can consider how the icons and images you are using would help them understand about a particular service in your design. These solid sets would keep the designs accessible.

Checking the Non-Web Friends

You can leave the user test for your products, as this would make you learn and improve your product more. This doesn’t have to be some big process, just show your design through your phone to your friends at some gathering.

Even though this may sound like something casual for you, user testing this way is quite fun and much more fun than talking about the weather and other things.

Asking for the Online Feedback

When working on a project online, you get a worldwide team at your disposal: the internet. You can also collect the early feedback posting the progress of services such as Behance and Dribble.  This would allow you to have your design, user tested and to measure the reactions with a minimal risk.

You can also join the virtual workspaces to offer feedbacks, answer questions and provide a peek at the designs for a quick gut check.

Taking it to the Team

Criticism isn’t helpful if you don’t act. This is the reason why you need to get critiques early and often. Fixing the problem would save you time and stress. Even the best designs would benefit from the strong backing team. When you hit a wall, take it to the team, even if the team consists of the internet message board and the imaginary people.

For more details and questions, feel free to consult with the design team of Medialinkers. Check the Medialinkers Reviews here.