Visual Crit Fun Time
When I joined Babylon last November the design org was playing catch up. The rest of the company had grown massively and design was just starting to transition from a centralized operating model to one with designers embedded in squads. While the rate of change was already quick, the increased number of designers required to reach this point meant we needed to hire even faster. Spoiler alert: we’ve gone from 15 to 75 in just under a year, but that’s a story for another post!
As I started hiring designers, I employed a three-phase strategy, encouraging the team to reflect on what stage of maturity their squad was currently in and where the priority lay, acknowledging it would shift over time:
- Ensure design isn’t a blocker
- Establish user-centered ways of working
- Improve design quality!
For many squads, this was the first dedicated designer they’d had, so there were many foundational and educational aspects required just to get them up and running. The framework above became a useful way-finding tool for me, both in delivering feedback on the work, but also in comparing the state of design maturity across the various squads and tribes I was working with. Sometimes designers tried to jump straight to #3 before they’d effectively built trust with their team, while others had done a great job at #1 but weren’t yet focusing enough on #2. It also helped give designers the permission to not worry as much about the high standards of output they might be used to elsewhere, and hone in on delivering immediate value to the team and our users. This isn’t the best long-term strategy, but to get things started it proved effective at raising awareness of design, optimizing for quantity over quality, and ultimately positioning designers to be valuable partners to Product and Engineering.
One big challenge, particularly during the earlier phases of design maturity, was helping provide examples and role models for what good quality design looks like. In general, the more experienced a designer, the more time they’d invest up front in understanding their users, framing the problem space, and getting their head around team dynamics before diving into solutions. Of course, this is the right approach but it meant there was a significant lag between senior folks joining, and reaching a point where design work was shipped in our app. The team were hungry to discuss UI design but the work shown in crits often had too many constraints or strategic challenges to dive into these sorts of craft details.
☝️”the team were hungry” get it? 🤦♂️
Enter Visual Crit Fun Time
We needed a place to nurture the craft of UI design across our rapidly growing team. We also needed to prove the value of critique to those who hadn’t worked in established design orgs before. Selfishly, I also wanted to see which designers really knew their stuff. That way I could potentially re-allocate them to different teams, or have them help out on more craft-centric projects.
I re-purposed a coaching technique I developed at BuzzFeed, for helping designers who wanted to develop their UI design chops, gave it a jazzy name and a gameshow-style format and away we went!
The Visual Crit Fun Time format is simple:
- Sessions happen for 30 minutes every Friday afternoon, ideally paired with a cool beverage from the fridge to help wind down the week together.
- There are typically 4–6 designers, including a facilitator and 1 or 2 folks who are working on their UI design craft.
- The people working on their craft are tasked with bringing an example of poor-quality UI design work to the session. This is often a website homepage or a couple of app screens in a flow, presented as screenshots on a single slide. Importantly: this shouldn’t be the work of anyone at the company, which frees people from typical business constraints and the challenges of delivering candid feedback. Poor-quality design is much better at revealing its flaws, and helps reduce any imposter syndrome that those in the room maybe experiencing.
- The session begins by loading the example on the screen. The facilitator starts a 90-second timer and the person who brought the design critiques every UI and Visual Design quality they notice — things like icon choices, typographic hierarchy, colour palettes, accessibility and native platform patterns.
- Once they finish, the timer is reset for another 90 seconds and the next person gives their critique, filling in any details not mentioned by the previous person. This happens again and again until there’s nothing more to add, typically 3 or 4 people. The most experienced person in the room goes last because noticing new details becomes harder and harder.
- Each critique takes about 10–15 minutes.
We started as a small group, but new designers kept finding their way to our sessions, curious to take part. Visual Crit Fun Time was developing a great reputation — I can’t think of many meetings people actively seek out and add to their calendars. The designers who appeared frustrated in our standard critique were suddenly free to go beyond the usual business constraints and forced to think on their feet. The designers bringing the work were growing in their awareness, as they learned from more experienced practitioners in the room. Creating this safe space for focused critique seemed to leave folks feeling energized and inspired to incorporate what they were learning into their daily work. And it’s this final part that ties Visual Crit Fun Time to the three-step strategy this post started with. Designers who needed to prioritise unblocking a product team had a moment every week to zoom out, and focus on the craft they cared about but were unable to deliver on regularly. In turn, this helped them get through the challenging earlier phases of design maturity, to the third where they’re able to spend more time focusing on the quality of the solution, not just deeply understanding their users and framing problems. At this point I should mention that many designers are more motivated by designing the right thing, rather than designing the thing right, but a large team requires strengths across all aspects of the double diamond.
The model of a tightly-scoped, fast-paced safe-space to learn from a range of folks is something I’ve found to be a really effective tool. It allows teams to step outside their day-to-day work, and hone their craft together. Visual Crit Fun Time might not be right for your team. But what is something your designers need right now? Where does your team need to level up? Perhaps improving UX writing, prototyping, accessibility knowledge or simply shipping more stuff? Adding another meeting is rarely going to be a popular choice, but I promise that if it delivers real value, it is possible to make it fun enough that people go out of their way to attend.
Special thanks to Liam, Gemma, Georgia, Chris, Chris, Carlos, Ed, Emma and James for being willing Visual Crit Fun Time contestants. And Lindsey, Cait and Allison who inspired much of this approach, back when we worked together at BuzzFeed.