Feedback: An absolute essential for growth in design
Feedback is absolutely crucial in helping you become a better designer. In your journey as a designer, you’ll definitely work with people who have valuable perspectives and opinions that are different from yours. Getting feedback on your designs not only validates your thought process, but also gives you the opportunity to gather more insights and different strategies to solving real problems.
Feedback is a catalyst for growth. It’s actually a fundamental necessity. The early stages of a child’s development, for example, are tightly hinged on an organic feedback cycle. The kind of response that the child receives after performing an action, whether simple or complicated, would affect their interpretation of that action and their confidence should such a situation occur at a later time. Throughout the course of our lives, we depend on the feedback from past experiences to navigate future challenges.
The same applies to product design. We naturally become more confident about the work we do and our progress when we receive feedback. Without consistent, regular feedback, our confidence as designers declines and our growth becomes endangered. The validation that comes with receiving feedback as designers is closely proportional to quality of the final output of our work.
Ideas (and people) improve on feedback
As a design leader, I have seen firsthand how influential and useful constructive feedback can be to the productivity of a designer. Designers are able to discover blind spots and areas in their work that need to be refined. I can say that we become better with every new feedback we receive.
The thing about feedback is that the individual giving the feedback on a solution or idea must have in some way experienced the solution; a certain amount of assessment would already have been carried out on the idea, so that what you hear is an interpretation of their experience. This interpretation can help you make important considerations and improvements to your work or how you were thinking it.
Feedback validates your thought process and ideas
Imagine that after you have designed a feature, you're unable to receive comments, responses, reactions or data from stakeholders or even users. There’d be no way to validate if you’ve designed a real, usable solution. And, yes, you can (and should) get feedback from users. Merely observing how users react and respond to your solution provides you with good enough feedback to help improve that product.
This is the stuff that usability is built around - observation and feedback.
In summary, getting feedback regularly helps us become better designers. In fact, designers should constantly solicit thoughtful and insightful feedback at the different stages of their process.
