What to Do With Feedback About Your Work

By Julia Breckenreid

It can feel uncomfortable to show unfinished or freshly-made work to others, but that kind of peer-review research plays an important role in the creative process. It’s a way to get our work out in front of those who will actually see and use it, regardless of whether that means asking a friend or family member for their opinions or conducting a professionally-run lab study with a one-way mirror.

Unfortunately we often mistakenly believe that feedback can only prove or disprove immutable truths about the work. We present our ideas to a few people, then take the opinions we garner (good or bad) to be the gospel about what it is we’ve created. If those we show the work to those who don’t like it, we throw it away. If they do like it, we consider that a sign we’ve done a good job and are finished.

In actuality, this is a constricting perspective to have, because design research isn’t meant to be a science. When it comes to creative endeavors, like design or writing, the value of any type of feedback is less about defining the hard truths and more about gathering meaning from what it is we create. As Jon Freach writes in The Atlantic:

If we don’t study the world, we don’t always know how or what to create…Design research is not ‘a science’ and is not necessarily ‘scientific.’ It gives (us) and (our) clients a much more nuanced understanding of the people for whom (we) design while providing knowledge that addresses some of the most fundamental questions we face throughout the process.

Freach goes on to explain that what we should expect from research is for it to help us identify patterns in the work we do as well as the behaviors of those who encounter our work. Paying attention to how someone interacts with what you’ve built, or if they reference similar things they’ve seen or experienced, are good ways to draw-out patterns we can then either build-off of or try to deviate from. He also believes that it should be used to better understand the relationships between what we do and who it’s for. Not only should we pay attention to how people react to our work, but what their reaction means for them: will they remember our work, and does our work make something in their lives easier or more entertaining? French writes that the best feedback works by “providing knowledge that addresses some of the most fundamental questions we face throughout the process.”

In order to get that knowledge and discover new ideas for our work, we must always seek simply to “ask simple questions about obvious things [that] can lead to unexpected answers and rich insights.”

Your work isn’t meant to always live in your computer or notebook. But you won’t really know that unless you take the work and put it out into the world.

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