[IxDA Discuss] Learning to design - critiques

[Eugene Chen]

I think peer critique is a great idea. How about starting with some very
informal and low-pressure sessions?

Have everyone gather and review the researach and design problem for a given
area. Then just jump in and (invidually) sketch out some solutions for
twenty minutes using pencil and paper. After 20 minutes, throw up the
sketches and talk about them. 

Noone will feel pressured to create anything "right" or "best" in such short
time. However, I'm sure even in only 20 minutes, everyone will surprised by
the variety of interesting and potentially useful ideas that will have
arised. 

As a side effect, you and everyone else will begin to get a guage of
everyone's relative experience and style. Someone will be very keen on
information design, but ignore widgets. Others will rely on all kinds of
fancy desktop metaphors and totally overkill it. It's the discussion that
will get everyone thinking and working as a team.

Repeat for 2-3 other sets of screens or scenarios. Watch out for idea
convergence or copying. Actively keep everyone involved to contain any know
it alls. Give some guidelines for the critique along the lines of what other
people have mentioned (critique the work not the person etc)

After a few group gropes like this, you could progress to assigning larger
and individual assignments to people. But still keep it to paper and pencil
and keep the time frames short, like 2-3 days, between review gatherings.
Keep everything taped on the wall along with pro con comments on stickies.


...Note that the dive into screens approach I'm talking about above is
really a teaching approach. With a more experienced designers, I generally
take the approach of working down from the big picture, using stickies to
map content and functions on to screens (as described by Constantine and
Lockwood). Breaking down tasks into detailed use cases, drawing flow and
content diagrams, etc. might also work well for the people you describe.
This approach takes the analytical so far that it gradually becomes
synthetic. 



Eugene Chen  |  User Experience Design, Strategy, and Usability main 415 282
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Donna Maurer [mailto:donnam at maadmob.net] 
> Sent: Monday, July 31, 2006 3:29 AM
> To: discuss at ixda.org
> Subject: [IxDA Discuss] Learning to design - critiques
> 
> Hi IxDers
> 
> I started today at a new contract leading a new UCD team on a 
> hugely important project. In doing so discovered that some of 
> my team are fine at UCD techniques (interviews, paper 
> prototype testing, usability
> testing) but are completely missing the vital element in the 
> middle - interaction design!
> 
> I have some strategies to work through this, and something I 
> want to try is to incorporate the idea of peer critiquing. 
> This is something I know is often done in design & visual 
> arts training but, not having grown from either of those 
> areas, don't know a lot about it.

>