12/14

Critiquing Critiques ¶

Thinking about how we critique each other is just as important as the changes we bring up in those critiques. There is no right way to critique someone, it depends on the topic, the audience and many other factors. But there is a good and bad way to do it. We can hone it towards something sharper.

Recently, I watched this video critique on the new Twitter browser interface design by @ys.

I too, think Twitter’s redesign makes some missteps, but this video is not a fair critique. When we evaluate others creative work, especially in the field of design where “form follows function”, it’s incredibly important to lay out where the words of criticism are coming from. Context. Criteria. These are incredibly important. If I designed a chair for babies but one of my friends came along and ripped into me because they didn’t find it very comfortable, well that’s not very fair, is it?

Criteria

How do we measure the values of a design? What are those values? Perhaps the designers at Twitter had to pick a target and that target is not us. However obvious it might seem that Youssef’s critique was based on the fact that he is… him, it remains implied and should be addressed. Beyond that, he mentions little reason for each criticism he makes. What does he want from Twitter? He says in the beginning that everything feels cramped, but never talks about why he’d like it to breathe more. Define the rules, then go in and describe how they’ve been broken. No matter how obvious they seem, they still need to be addressed.

Here’s some potential criteria for criticizing New Twitter:

• We are the early adopters. We are the users that believe in what is most central to your product. Tweeting.
• New Twitter should allow for more space and less options because Twitter has always been about simple public messages shared amongst all users.
• The tweets are the most important part of Twitter. Focusing on their parameters and peripheral functionality detracts from their importance in a negative and confusing way.
• Tertiary eco systems like “Who to Follow” and metadata should be more context based, tailored for new users as opposed to veterans with their own discovery systems.

But these rules are what one person would like to see from Twitter. I would like it too. Make it two people. But beyond us, Twitter might have a different goal in mind: Growth. As a business, growth is king, at least it always has been in this consumer driven economy. That’s what that “Who to Follow” box is for on the left [maybe]. To give someone with no idea about twitter an idea.

Hey, ok! I’ve got a Twitter account. Now what? Nobody is tweeting… Hey what’s this? Ok I’ll follow them.

This kind of mechanism allows for new users to grow and become invested in Twitter. However, another thing that might be important to new users could be to simply understand what Twitter is. Without any tutorial, seeing the “product” for the first time, a new user might very well miss that she could tweet with the blue button in the top right, or the now-small text box on the left sidebar.

Using this assumed criteria of “New Twitter is designed for new users”, some inconsistencies start showing up. Perhaps I’m wrong. It’s pretty likely. However this is where another key component of a critique could help us move towards an understanding. A dialog.

Dialog

Without some kind of conversation, be it real-time or asynchronous, we really have no idea what the design team was intending with rolling out this new design. To simply cry out that this is “bad” without knowing what type of yard stick to measure it by, serves nobody. I think it’s likely that Youssef’s critique will receive little more than a few words from the design team. That’s not the design team’s fault, it’s Youssef’s. He didn’t start a conversation. If you watched the video and put yourself in the shoes of Twitter, it might feel more like being talked at, rather than talked with.

There are pitfalls though. Dialog in a critique can often turn quickly into a rationalization mechanism. For each point made, the designer might snap back with a reason for that issue. That’s fine, and somewhat expected, but when this happens on nearly every point, it’s more of a coping mechanism for the designer than reaching an understanding about where she was coming from. Often times, if enough rationalizations are made, they often turn into excuses and it’s easy to see that when set side-by-side, they themselves don’t mesh into a single vision/strategy.

Within the video, Youssef mentioned that the design team did get back to him on his initial list of points about the new design. They said they were “subjective”. I agree that hearing that response can be frustrating. We are in a subjective medium. Anything creative is subjective. Though the practice of good design has been around for centuries now and we have a rubrik to go by. We can talk intelligently and weigh design choices against an intention. But we must know that intention. We must talk to each other. Without that, it will remain a subjective opinion as opposed to seeing eye to eye on a design problem.

And why should they? They might have screwed up, they might have lost sight of their original intention with New Twitter, who knows. It’s not really our business, but something isn’t hitting the mark. Either it’s not meant for “us” or somewhere along the line, the design got out from underneath them and became something else entirely.

Player’s Rage

Curiously, game designers are probably much more familiar with the kind of reaction that Youssef had to the Twitter redesign. Being a designer himself, he feels it’s a little more inexcusable to ship a product with these issues that cause a lot of friction in his experience. Furthermore, he’s a longtime user and has gotten used to how Twitter worked previously. The problem is, that in interface design, we don’t see the same kind of rage that we do when we watch people play our games.

It has become somewhat of a tenant of game design to never take your player’s reactions at face value, but certainly listen to them. They are pure, but the reaction is not the solution. In games, people have a sense of agency that is unparalleled in all other media. Because of this fact, players have no problem speaking extremely candidly about how they feel during an observed game session. This is great. But we always have to temper their reaction. If a player says “That boss in level 5 is way too hard.” That doesn’t mean the solution is making it easier. If a player says “I couldn’t shoot fast enough.” Changing the rate of fire on a certain weapon type won’t fix his concerns. It’s likely there is more going on. Designers have to be incredibly observant and take into account the entire experience. “I couldn’t shoot fast enough” might simply mean that the enemy’s movement pattern is too sporadic and needs to be more predictable. Perhaps the game needs more visual/audio queues to hint at the pattern so the player can fire with more accuracy.

This “rage” imparts a beautiful kind of honesty from players, but it’s less connected with emotion when interacting with more inert experiences like a webpage. While the fire from Youssef gives off a bit of a sulfurous scent, it is still lit with the best intentions. However, the leading with that “fire” is helping anyone. I don’t think UX designers can filter that kind of criticism into something useful, not because they are somehow bad at it, but because the criticism is not paired with the experience of actually watching that person use their product.

Preparing criticism for a fellow designer should not only involve illustrating the problems with the design, but also include a second pass over those points that transmutes them from raw data into something more useful. By turning inward and evaluating our own thoughts on another’s design, a rant can turn into an undeniable argument fairly quickly.