Feedback: How to Give Great Feedback

This is the second part of a three part series on feedback. If you want to learn how to ask for constructive, targeted feedback head to the first part here: First Part

Let’s dive into how to give good feedback. Someone shows you the project they’ve been working hard on for weeks or maybe months! They are nervous, excited, looking for validation, but you immediately see something they can fix. How do you share that feedback and still recognize their hard work and accomplishment?

Don’t worry. It can be done.

Giving constructive feedback is an art form, so it makes perfect sense that we would look to the arts for a model to help guide feedback.

My friend Manny Ikomi (Remember him from Part One?: (Twitter, Polywork, Twitch) and I started talking about feedback initially in the context of students going through critiques in art school. We spoke at length about how critiques go down in an fine arts program and how some key components of that process could transfer into the feedback we give in tech.

As a caveat, critiques in fine art programs are not all puppies and sunshine. Done incorrectly, they can be a destructive process. As someone who worked at an arts college and saw students struggle after receiving harsh critiques, I know how crucial this structure is for all involved.

Manny provided an outline to guide you when giving feedback. You should use following questions to evaluate a project:

1. What do I think went well? What did you genuinely like or appreciate about the project?
2. What do I think could be improved? What could be tweaked or changed to make it work a little better?
3. What ideas do I have? Different from #2 in that it attempts to provide assistance rather than pure criticism. This is often a response to the critique offered in #2. What is your proposed solution?
4. What questions remain for me about the project? What follow-up would you like? What next steps would you like to see? Is there something missing for you?

All feedback should include answers to ALL FOUR questions.

How many times have you received feedback and it was like someone applied a .slice([1]) on this array of questions and handed you nothing but CRITICISM. How did that feel?

Not great, friends, not great. So let's put on our empathy pants, and when friends, fellow students, coworkers, and strangers ask for feedback on Twitter or in another public space, try to give them a consolidated version of this feedback block.

Let's try it out.

Say your friend posts their portfolio website on Twitter and says “Let me know what you think!” (We know from Part One your friend is treading on dangerous ground with that broad of an ask.)

You decide to take a look. The banner image is loading slowly either because there is unused CSS or the image is unnecessarily large. You think it might be both.

I got feedback on my first post that you'd like to see what NOT to do. In this case, what not to say would be something like, "Hey, your site is loading super slow." Or "There's something wrong with your banner." Or just sending a screenshot of the missing banner. All these options don't meet the four criteria above and they leave the person hanging. Not helpful and a little accusatory.

What is a possible piece of feedback you could share that could answer all four critique questions?

Here's an example... (sent to their DMs because you are an awesome friend.)

"This looks AMAZINGGGG! One note, the banner image is the last thing to load for me. I think it's because the image is really large. Or you have CSS you don't need. When a similar issue happened for me, I found this site [URL] really helpful. I'd be happy to help troubleshoot, if you'd like. Seriously though, this is great and I'd love to see future iterations as you update it!"

Oh wow. Don't you feel supported? And look, actionable items, thoughtful feedback. The general design is not trashed. We all feel good.

The fact of the matter is, if someone brings their work to social media, they probably think it looks pretty good, and it only makes sense to be gentle and provide them with help vs. thoughtless, mean-spirited trash comments.

(If you are the type of person who enjoys just trashing people's hard work for fun, kindly leave my blog and never return. BYE.)

You’ll only get better at giving feedback the more you do it, and you probably won’t get it right every time. Sometimes there’s not an easy way to tell someone that their color palette is eye searing, but you can suggest to them that it might not meet ADA accessibility guidelines. That is if they ask.

Next, week, in part three we’ll get into what to do with feedback once you receive it, emotionally and rationally, and what to do with unsolicited feedback… a tricky topic for sure.

Thanks again to Manny Ikomi for the inspiration and insights that got this post going. Be sure to catch him on Twitch where he's working on a financial literacy platform for the LGBTQ+ community among other cool things: MannyMoki on Twitch.