Critique without adjectives

In January I introduced one rule at the Thursday critique: you can’t use an adjective about the design. No “clean”, no “clunky”, no “busy”, no “nice”. It sounds like a gimmick and the first session was awkward, with a lot of long pauses and Emeka saying “well” four times.

The reason is that adjectives are conclusions with the reasoning removed. When someone says a screen is busy, I can’t act on it. When someone says “I looked at the top right first, then at the price, and I didn’t see the button until the second time”, I can.

What did you look at first, and what did you expect to happen next?

That is the question I keep asking instead. The group slowly learned to answer it.

People are good at describing what they did. They are much worse at describing what they felt, and the second description is the one that usually turns out to be wrong.

After four weeks, the critiques had changed in a way I had not predicted. They got shorter. We ran 60-minute slots that finished in 40. Fewer arguments about taste, because there was nothing to argue with: either you looked at the button or you did not.

When it breaks

It breaks when the work is early. At the sketch stage, adjectives are useful because they point at a general direction. “Calmer” is a perfectly fine thing to say about a layout in week one. So the rule applies only once the work is at the stage defined in the review rules, where somebody has said it is nearly done.

It also breaks when a senior person is in the room and says “I just don’t like it”. I have no clean fix for that. Mostly I ask what they looked at first and wait.