What Working at Facebook Has Taught Me About Design Critique | Hacker News Reader

What Working at Facebook Has Taught Me About Design Critique

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125 pointstannerc65 comments

Learning to give and receive feedback is one of the skills that will make you and your team better and is an important part of communication. Effective communication is crucial, no matter the size of the team. The list of the distinctions between 'criticism' and 'criticism' in this article is particularly valuable.

Criticism passes judgement — Critique poses questions; Criticism finds fault — Critique uncovers opportunity; Criticism is personal — Critique is objective; Criticism is vague — Critique is concrete; Criticism tears down — Critique builds up; Criticism is ego-centric — Critique is altruistic; Criticism is adversarial — Critique is cooperative; Criticism belittles the designer — Critique improves the design

I disagree. Criticism is awesome. If people can't handle criticism then they should change profession. If 1 person says something negative. Then there's 1000s more who feel the same who say nothing.

Constructive criticism is even better.

Criticism is only personal if you make it personal. Criticism is only egocentric if you make it egocentric. Criticism is on vague when it is not constructive. Criticism only belittles if it is targeted at the person and not the thing being critiqued.

Feedback has been and always will be a two way street. It's on the critiquer to word their comments in an impersonal, constructive manner just as much as it is on the critiqued to receive comments with grace and poise. Feedback is an active collaboration for a better product and all involved parties are on the hook to contribute in a manner that allows all other parties to also contribute.

>Criticism is only personal if you make it personal. Criticism is only egocentric if you make it

That usually begins with the person doing the criticizing.

“He who takes offense when offense was not intended is a fool, yet he who takes offense when offense is intended is an even greater fool for he has succumbed to the will of his adversary.” ― Brigham Young

That said, I do think the GP has a point: it is possible to divide feedback according to the two sets of criteria mentioned, and that things go better when we craft our communication to be the nicer one (he called it critique, you call it constructive criticism).

I'm not going to use the fact that people should be able to handle criticism to give mean feedback. And I think that's the point he's making - we should choose to be nice.

Perhaps it would be better to copy the processes of companies/teams notable for outstanding design - or any other process.

I wasn't aware that Facebook was an authority in design.

There's beautiful/functional design all over the web. But my experience of FB is that the UI is somewhere between "Mostly OK, I guess" and "That really doesn't work very well and it's annoying."

If it's taking two hours of review time a week to create that, the process may not be optimal.

Just remember, Facebook are designing a UI for 1 Billion people. That's going to require a lot more "common understandable simplicity" than most applications.

That's going to require a lot more "common understandable simplicity" than most applications.

Whether or not that is true doesn't matter when facebook is very much not "common understandable simplicity."

Facebook's interface is a bewildering mess to use anything other than their chat or twitter clone.

It's vital to learn to see past emotion when receiving statements from critics.

I have heard lots of comments about my projects over the years and I have noticed some patterns:

- Negative feedback is usually all you get. You have to motivate yourself by imagining that most people are pretty happy based on downloads/client-count/whatever.

- People aren't good at communicating when they're frustrated but they usually turn into nice people once you've fixed the problem. Most people just have a job to do and a deadline to meet. Pay attention to what they say is wrong, and not their mood.

- Strangely, people will spend great amounts of time writing comments on random web sites or review pages about issues that they will never even E-mail you about, no matter how easy you make it for them to contact you. Therefore, if you really want to get some realistic critiques of your work, you may have to scour the web for them. I look at it this way: real, honest feedback is rare and vital to really understand what you may have overlooked. Even if you can't possibly contact the Random Web Commenter, find and fix their issues and you'll end up with a better product.

I don't think this is useful for startups in general. It sounds like it's good for gigantocorps like IBM and Facebook (and yes, I'm lumping them together, as they have more in common than they differ). For a lean startup, I don't think you're going to have the depth in your staff nor the time to put into these sorts of activities. It's all-hands-on-deck, and we don't have time to slow down and hand-hold each other through their own work. I'd be hiring people I trust to get their work done without me needing to tell them they are or are not doing a good job.

I mean, at a particularly early stage startup, establishing the "three roles" could be the entire company. In such a scenario, how do we not already know each other's intimate business?

Code reviews/design critiques are extremely valuable even if you only have two developers, and they're both great at their jobs. It's not about not trusting the other members of your team, it's about learning from each others' experiences and creating a better product together.

But I agree that the level of ceremony surrounding the process will vary a lot based on the size of your organization.

I agree that review/critique is just as important, even if you have only a few people. Even with a small group though, roles for participants can help keep conversations on track and civil and ensure everyone can participate.

Establishing roles for bad-actor participants is not how you keep conversations on track and keep them civil, it's how you get passive aggression.

A lot of corporate policies are about limiting damage by bad actors.

I know. My point is that large corporations have little in common with startups. A startup should not already be so ossified that it's possible for bad actors to get in and stay in.

In other words, if you get to the point that you need to wage legalese wars with corporate policy documents, you're probably not a startup anymore. We really need to stop treating big, 5+ year old companies like Twitter as "startups".

Roles can help to keep conversations civil when the participants are benign as well as malign by removing communication friction. For malign actors they make it easier to pick out specific behaviours to review in one on ones and - if they persist - dismiss them for.

I agree, to be honest it reminds me of newspeak, and whilst having a rigorous framework in place with allowed language patterns might well help in the corporate world, startups are not going to want to waste cognitive load on it.

I was going to comment: It's written in that corporatese/political/management style that reminds me of orwellian critiques of language.

It is superficially and obviously true, provides labels and slogans, but doesn't actually say anything meaningful or particularly concrete.

Everyone can read it, nod their head in agreement, it provides those with authority words to use that support them in however they want to structure things, and a mirror image opposition vocab provides standard put downs against those forms they don't like which can't really be argued against...

But if you brought everyone together and got them to read it, i don't think most people would have actually changed their mind much about how they think or what they would do, specifically because the language is pretty much vacant empty fluff...

Like the literary equivalent of rorschach inkblots.

It's one of those things where you have to learn the rules before you can break them. The problem with such things is that if you present them as rules you can break when you learn them, smart people are so eager to get to the rule breaking bit that they try and skip over the rule learning as fast as possible.

The solution seems to be to confidently present them as rigidly plain rules and only let people in on the secret that they're breakable once they've demonstrated some degree of mastery. It's better to optimize for breaking the rules too late vs breaking the rules too early.

You see this all the time in beginner art classes. A big list of The Rules is presented up front and there's no brooking of dissention. Even if you break The Rules in the right way, you are punished because it's not yet time to break The Rules.

This is a failure of messaging on behalf of art schools. Such classes should make it clear that certain technique is being learned, not general 'art'. If the expressed goal is to learn technique, then no student should be surprised to receive bad marks for failure to adhere to technique.

And that is schooling. This is industry. You're not here to learn the basics of your craft. You're here to perform. I don't think there is any room for junior people in a startup. Some non-producer, MBA-ran startups think they can't afford senior people. I think we can't afford the inevitable mistakes from inexperienced--however well-meaning--people.

But coding is complex and ever evolving. No matter how senior you are there is always something to learn.

This is one of those "slow down to speed up" kind of things that startups ignore at their peril. People, especially technical types, have a mistaken assumption that "speed" in startupland is based on the amount of code shipped and anything that distracts from code shipping is a distraction to be ruthlessly excised.

The real speed that a startup should be optimizing for is the degree of new, actionable, insights produced on the quest towards product/market fit. Code should only be built insofar as it helps provide scaffolding towards that goal.

Design critique is helpful because it helps you get faster at getting faster. It's not some crutch that weaker designers need to adopt to keep up with the rest of us, it's a fundamental way in which designers learn and get better at their craft.

But look at the artifice of this whole process. The need to establish "roles". The prescribed language. If I did that with my team, they'd rightly look at me sideways and say, "what the hell is wrong with you, just spit it out already."

It's not that I'm advocating a heads-down, never-come-up-for-air approach. It's that I'd expect these sort of conversations to have happened in an organic fashion that doesn't cargo-cult corporate policy gerrymandering.

Sometimes a little bit of ceremony helps change existing behaviors and gives people with different perspectives the opportunities to speak up.

A startup is not the place to have a personal journey of growth. It's a place to figure out an awesome thing to make and turn it into money. A startup isn't a class group project. That doesn't mean it should be adversarial like Linus Torvalds treats Linux kernel developers. But that's a far cry from expecting other people on your team to speak up and put in their contribution without needing to be prompted.

That's also making the false assumption that the only way to make an awesome thing and money is to expect everyone else to behave like yourself. The reality is that creating something that's truly amazing takes a variety of perspectives and personality types and sometimes actively cultivating that is critical, even in tiny teams. Mind you, if you only hire people exactly like yourself that solves that problem fairly well for the first year or so.

Timid people are not a protected class. This isn't a diversity issue. Bringing it up is just muddying the waters.

So far from true. At a startup, everyone is blunt, because it pays to be. Everyone there is counting on success.

Whereas at a corp, the ceremony was created by someone else who may not even work there anymore, for some superpsionic reasons that everyone basically just shrugs at because they don't want to lose their jobs. It'a a sludsgefest that startups can skip - no point in needless vagaries when in a startup, it's actually appreciated to collaborate organically instead of being culled for doing so.

So much of that response is utterly loaded with flawed assumptions. The irony is that your response is exactly why sometimes it's important to be cognisant of how to conduct critical conversations. It's not about "needless vagaries", it's actually about direct and on-point critique, without the loaded value judgements. This isn't a skill that tends to come naturally to people, that's what the "ceremony" is for.

You do get immediate return on doing this. In art it is common to ask for critique-- it immediately improves that particular drawing (hey mate, you should maybe fix her nose, she looks like a pig) while also helping in the long run (okay I won't draw noses like that anymore).

It's not like you have to put a crown on everyone's head. The article goes really into detail, but it basically boils down to "Take turns." It encourages everyone to engage without talking over each other, avoids shying away from ever presenting your work, or going onto long rants. Which are things the author has mentioned has happened at other companies. Even in a small 3 person group, it's easy for one person to dominate the conversation. You don't want that. You want to utilize everyone's perspective and skillset. Three heads are better than one.

Certainly you'd have to adapt the model to work for such a small startup. That doesn't mean you shouldn't share and gain feedback on your work.

This is an amusingly familiar argument. As a consultant, I see so many companies–small startups and big companies alike–wasting weeks and months of time on wasteful work because of this strong bias against "wasting time" to coordinate their efforts. They're avoiding dealing with communication problems within their teams and reflecting on their work, or, as in this case, stopping to critically think and exchange ideas about a project as it's underway. All things that can avoid team-weeks of effort spent moving in the wrong direction or delivering a shoddy product because the scope of consideration was overly narrow.

Protocols such as this make it possible for groups of people to come together productively and shape a collective effort by reconciling multiple perspectives. The kind of discipline outlined here is what separates companies limited by the natural interaction dynamics of a few personalities and those that overcome those dynamics to combine the best of the talents of all the contributors.

If anything, these things can be more important for a tiny, lean startup, as you have less runway to charge down paths that aren't optimal than a big company with an established product.

Read this a few weeks ago. Really useful advice.

Speaking of design critique, are young people able to read articles with hilarious animated gifs in them? Because I literally cannot; a pity because the first section seemed promising.

"literally"?

Yes! I am not one who misuses "literally", nor am I one who chooses to be a pedant over every choice of words in order to willfully miss the point of any discussion. I literally could not read the article because my eye kept being dragged back to the gifs.

Agreed...the gifs were ill-chosen and distracting...added nothing...not a good fit for the thrust of the article...

Heh, sorry. I was trying poke fun at your post by doing what you did, regarding the article; focus on the wrong thing and disregard the the entire article/post because of a small, arguably unwise choice (gifs/misusing "literally").

The article is actually quite good.

That's pretty meta, if anyone else got that I congratulate you.

But to be honest, I did hesitate before posting because it was off-topic. However this is HN, not the author's comments section, so I feel it's my prerogative to comment on any aspect of the article not just the content.

I was hesitant as well. Thankfully, HN is usually quick to downvote crap posts like mine. Lesson learned.

Honestly though, I do get kinda tired of looking in the comments to see so much conversation about off-topic things like the color-scheme or background images of the linked site. "Off-topic" is subjective, of course.

Yes, the constant movement in the middle of text I'm trying to read is a huge distraction. It should only play once, or maybe when I mouse over it.

Does Chrome have an extension to control looping gifs? Back in the day, I was able to configure my browser that looping gifs would play only once. I'd love something like that.

> Does Chrome have an extension to control looping gifs?

Have a look at Gif Jam: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gif-jam-animation-...

Focusing on the words seems to work for me.

I just scrolled the window to hide the images. But I agree, it's a bad idea.

This article optimised for lynx.

I didn't mind them, but I definitely scrolled until they were off screen when starting to read the text below.

For articles that I find unpleasant to read (for reasons other than the content itself), I either use Readability through the GleeBox extension, where I can just pull up the 'console' and use the '!read' command, or I use Instapaper. I can strongly recommend the latter, as it also provides basic bookmarking, organising, highlighting and 'social' features. But for the basics a Readability bookmarklet (or something similar) should be enough.

It's still annoying though (although strangely animated gifs don't bother me)!

Because of all the animation and parallax scrolling madness I got used to just scan new articles and immediately post them to instapaper or pocket for actual reading.

More and more I'm getting in the habit of hitting the "Reader View" button in Safari. It removes all ads, gifs, "related content" etc. and gives me the pure content: the article in an easy to read font.

Firefox also has a built-in Reader View but it leaves the graphics in, in case they are referred to by and necessary to understand the text.

Firefox (esp. Android), but yes, it's the very, very, very rare website whose native design is preferable to the "Reader Mode" alternative. Among the reasons I suspect Web design is a dead end.

But as noted, this doesn't disable GIFs.

I went into the inspector and added the css rule:

    img[src*=gif] {
        display: none;
    }

I'm a young people and the answer is no. Maybe if it's buzzfeed and the article is comprised solely of it. But in that case the gifs would have at least relevant content in them, unlike these.

I see it a lot in articles coming from people who work at Facebook and Google, maybe it's something to do with all that "fun" malarkey that they're allowed, whatever it is.

I've employed Stylish to add a number of default rules.

Setting the visibility / opacity of gifs to 0 by default, but enabling them on hover, with a transition delay, works pretty well.

For animations which are in fact useful, I can see them. For those which aren't, I can avoid them. Finding appropriate transition delays (usually ~0.3s for on hover, 3-6 seconds to revert) is a matter of personal taste.

I combine that with Greasemonkey on a per-site basis. The following script, slightly modified per-site, can make it so the page only displays the content area. No navigation, no side-bar ads, nothing but the content. Combined with Stylish to style and center the content, remove images, make the typography easier to read, and fix contrast issues/href colors. I use it for practically all news/media sites to make my reading experiences more enjoyable.

It's like my own personal "Readable" or whatever the Safari add-on / that-one-site is called. :)

    document.body.innerHTML=document.getElementById('content').innerHTML;

Yes

Edit: Fuck your downvotes. I answered his question. HN is such a shit show these days.

> Fuck your downvotes. [...] HN is such a shit show these days.

Please don't post comments like this.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10922770 and marked it off-topic.

Someone asked a yes/no question. I answered yes. And got downvoted. I stand by my statement.

For what it's worth, I agree with forrestthewoods here.

They should not have complained so harshly, but the entire subthread is little more than snobbery towards cultural trends.

The top comment isn't even about the content of the article.

Being downvoted for answering a straightforward question with a straightforward answer is certainly a frustrating feeling, and it's one I relate with. There's another aspect: It highlights that the question itself was disingenuous. No one was seriously asking whether people can read articles like these.

It's true that all of this is beside the point, and that the only mod action here was to request that they not conduct themselves badly. That's fine. But the frustration that led to their behavior is valid. It's much easier to call out bad behavior than to influence disingenuousness; I'm just hoping both will go away.

Silly sillysaurus,

Hacker News is for social signalling games, not frank discussion.

Everyone gets downvoted. Yes, it's annoying, but venting that annoyance back on the site adds nothing of value, only off-topic noise. The HN guidelines ask everyone not to do that, so please don't do that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How do I delete my HN account and all it's comments?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=How+do+I+delete+my+HN+account+and+all+i...

Thanks for this reply. It saves me from having to explain why I'd want to do such a thing.

I agree with forest, someone should not be penalised for answering a question honestly.

The guidelines say to avoid "gratuitous negativity" in comments, yet it seems quite common for HN users to be gratuitously negative with their downvotes.

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