Play your part

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Many designers strive for feedback — they use sites like Dribbble and Forrst, and even Twitter to show off their latest creations, receive feedback and criticism. But what a lot of them forget to do is provide feedback themselves, or even reply to the feedback they receive from the community. Unfortunately, there are some people who piggyback off the community, getting feedback when they wish but neglecting to recognise it or to contribute their thoughts to the work of others.

I for one try to get back to every single person who leaves valid or helpful criticism. Now, when you’ve got just a few followers who look out for you and give you some feedback, that’s easily manageable. But let’s say you post something on Dribbble, and you get a ridiculous amount of feedback. Some good, some bad, but there’s a lot of it.

Popular (but fictional) post on Dribbble

So much feedback! But how can I possibly respond?

Don’t worry, my posts aren’t nearly as popular on Dribbble. But what could you do? It would be silly to reply to each comment. Perhaps send some twitter shout-outs thanking people, or reply to the comments you found particularly useful. Forrst has done a great job by allowing users to vote for helpful comments — at the cost of a few acorns, the ‘currency’ employed on the site.

If you’re going to ask for feedback, be sure to involve yourself in the wider community. Find other people looking for feedback, let others know if they’re doing a good job, and most importantly be sure to thank the people who have helped you!

  • http://www.adamwhitcroft.com Adam Whitcroft

    I take the same approach to you, when someone leaves a comment on a post of mine on Forrst / Dribbble whatever I’ll be sure to leave them a message.

    Not sure what I would do if I had 4,639 comments on a post but I think it’s safe enough to assume they were not all made at the same time, so the user could pretty easily manage them as they rolled in. Not necessarily respond to each comment, but maybe every 10 they could do a sort of ‘@you, @you, @you, @you thanks’.

    User feedback is generally much better on Forrst than that on Dribbble (unless you have a ton of followers on Dribbble or are well known in design circles that is) — not sure if that is attributable to the community itself or what?

  • http://graphiceyedea.co.uk prisca

    Nice post, Dan :)
    & I completely agree. Asking for feedback is one thing ~ yet giving it should go without saying. I think some people forget how productive this kind of discussion can be ~ on any design work, be it their own or other people’s.

  • http://www.adamwhitcroft.com Adam Whitcroft

    I’ve got a counter argument to put to you Dan:

    Whilst I agree that giving feedback when it’s requested is important, I’ve noticed a bit of a trend starting on Forrst where people are using the community feedback spirit to essentially complete their design for them.

    What I mean is this: There are increasing numbers of posts being made where the postee opens with something along the lines of “I’ve spent about a day on this and I want feedback” followed by something that is clearly incomplete and obviously slapdash. They have done the absolute bare minimum of ‘design’ work to post on Forrst without getting called out. What follows (usually) is a bunch of well thought out critique and feedback from the community, all of which the postee takes, applies verbatim to their design and then spits it right back out. Sometimes those the helped get a mention, but more often than not they don’t.

    What do you think of this?

    • http://daneden.me Dan Eden

      Hmm, an interesting point. I completely see what you mean, but I’m also pretty sure that those people aren’t looking for a do-over, they might genuinely think its a decent design. Feedback is there to improve work, so its only natural for the designer to take the public’s criticism and tips and apply them to the design.

      Unfortunately, there is a lot of low quality design on communities such as Forrst — to be honest, I think the invite system should be more strict, like that of Dribbble. Indeed, you might say that people are in effect completing the design, but without that feedback we’d all still be designing like it’s 1999.

  • http://www.lukejones.me/ Luke Jones

    I half agree with you here. There comes a point where it’s close to impossible to respond to all of the comments people add on these sites. But where fewer people have commented, there’s certainly little (or no) excuse to not responding to the feedback. After all, the people have taken the time out of their schedule to give you advice haven’t they?

    I know it’s slightly different, but that article I wrote is an example of it being a massive headache to respond to each comment. In the end, I read through each comment and responded to the ones which really needed a response or the ones which were unique.