How to give feedback well

In the course of a well-lived life, you’ll hopefully be asked to give feedback on someone’s hard work.  Sometimes you’ll be an expert in the domain (this happens most often in the workplace, and is where you can get your best practice); and other times you’ll be armed only with extremely general knowledge to help someone out with something important, specific, and challenging even to them.

In the Web industry, we’re used to iterating on our own work — a concept that means we should always be revising and always squeezing the very best solution out of whatever problems we’re solving with that particular interface or interaction.  But I’m convinced that iterating on other people’s work builds the same sort of mental ‘muscles’ we need to be efficient at iterating on our own work, especially if we know nothing about their stuff, because you’re tasked with three things:

1. Quickly parsing and understanding as intimately as possible what they’re working on so you’ll be any good at all;
2. Testing, using, reading, sampling, or experiencing their creation with a critical eye, regardless of if you know nothing about it;
3. and lastly, trying to give feedback that will be meaningful and helpful.

On Hacker News yesterday there was an example of a woman who, when asked for help on a web design, responded back with an entire slide deck of extremely valuable copy-editing feedback.  I found myself amazed by not only the quality of what she’d produced, but her willingness to help just a simple acquaintance with so much hard work, for free.

She must have gotten something out of it, even as a clear professional in that field, or she wouldn’t have done it. I found myself thinking of the ways she must have benefited, but knew I was often reluctant to give feedback myself, and wanted to get the same benefits she was able to get.  So let’s go back up to the three tasks before and turn them into benefits:

1. Quickly parsing and understanding as intimately as possible what they’re working on so you’ll be any good at all; She tasked herself with learning his value proposition, business model, and key purpose as an outsider.  This kind of design review was invaluable because it provided the creator with both an outsider perspective and professional feedback; and being able to do that as a professional will make all your marketing better, because you’ve completed the arduous achievement of turning off the designer in you. Key Benefit: She was able to practice being a “normal”.
2. Testing, using, reading, sampling, or experiencing their creation with a critical eye, regardless of if you know nothing about it; This too is really hard for many professionals; snapping out of their one-track mode of common work (whether it be web design or something else) and into the challenge of critiquing something you know nothing about will force you to learn something new and, in the process, get your creativity flowing in your own work.  In order to give actual meaningful feedback, too, you’ll have to expand your own brain. Key Benefit: She was able to spike her creativity and learn lessons from someone else’s work.
3. and lastly, trying to give feedback that will be meaningful and helpful. Many people might think that they shouldn’t talk assertively or authoritatively when reviewing someone else’s work. The truth is that that’s really the only way critique should be given if it is to mean anything at all.  Giving critique passionately but genuinely will enable you to take critique better yourself, and to understand where people are coming from.  Key Benefit: Through critiqueing other people, you learn how to extract the best nuggets from other people’s criticism of your own work. However: Don’t critique someone’s work too confidently, either positively or negatively, unless you’ve done the former two steps.  If you haven’t, you might lead them down an erroneous path.