Engaging multiple stakeholders with the dots and cards design critique

If you’re a designer who finds themselves working with lots of stakeholders on a project, then you know the challenge of bringing them into agreement; particularly when you talk to them separately.

Sometimes the stakeholders’ roles don’t overlap enough for them to be in the same room very often. To complicate things further, sometimes you find out about important stakeholders deep into a project.

A common critique format is akin to a road show, where you take the design around and present it. You take feedback, suggestions, alterations. Presenting separately brings with it the pain of stakeholders contradicting or fighting with each other through you. By working this way, we don’t always put people in a meeting format in which they can have successful discourse about the direction of a design or product.

Even if you can manage to put everyone in the same room, demoing a design presentation puts stakeholders in a passive format where they don’t get to work. This TV-show critique format also allows stakeholders to bark updates and changes, without defending why or doing any work to back up their rationale.

Enter Dots-and-Cards

This meeting format is something I’ve picked up since working at Pivotal Labs and isn’t an uncommon approach. Frankly, I’ve seen it work magic on enterprise projects with half a dozen stakeholders who have trouble agreeing with each other because they rarely meet together. D&C mends these issues, brought about by a lack of collocation and communication, by putting them in a format where they must supply and then defend their feedback on design work in front of their peers.

The format is simple, you’ll need some colorful dot stickers, some sharpie markers, a stack of index cards, and your designs printed for hanging on the wall. When your stakeholders enter the room, supply them with the dots, the pens, and the cards.

Next, have your group review the designs. I usually set a timer for 5–10 minutes for each print, and have them move onto the next. As they review silently, ask them have them number and initial one dot per question or comment they have. For each dot, have them write an expanded thought or note on the index cards provided, no longer than a Tweet.

Having the stakeholders get up and review the design gets them out of the phone-it-in method and into a more active state of mind.

Once everyone has made their comments, everyone can sit down and you then call out each initialed/numbered dot, and have the stakeholder explain their feedback. Ideally, a second person (doesn’t have to be a designer) jots down the feedback. With dots-and-cards you don’t have to defend your ideas unless explicitly called on. The main benefit is to incite feedback and get your stakeholders to communicate.

The Benefits

The format is straightforward enough, but the benefits are nothing short of miraculous.

Everyone necessary to the conversation is present, doing the same job on a level playing field. Everyone submits their feedback the same way, and through writing it down and expressing it verbally they take ownership over the outcome of their feedback in the same way.

Dots and cards forces people to confront each others ideas. The problem of collecting feedback from stakeholders separately has been mitigated. What you will find is people will zero in on an area they’re passionate about, have a cage match over it, then split the difference. This is nearly impossible to achieve when they’re not in the same room.

Hotspots. You may find problem areas in your design by the number of dots clustered in one area. This hotspotting makes it clear that something is up in one area. It could be they all have compliments, or complaints. Hotspots are also a way of demonstrating to a group of very different people, that they are all on the same page in their thinking.

Design actually drives this activity, not the stakeholders. By putting a constraint around how feedback is communicated, this puts design in a leading position within the group dynamic. This also enables you to be the arbiter of arguments, or tangents, if you choose.

As you gain traction through this form of participation, you start to get approvals on design. People are agreeing with each other, or collectively punting or deprecating ideas they aren’t ready to engage yet. You are now a hero, celebrate yourself.

Finally, you’re engaging different learning styles. Not everyone communicates effectively in a verbal-only feedback format. When you engage people with reviewing work on a wall and writing things down, you open the process to different styles, while offering people time to think their ideas through before jumping into the conversation.

Conclusion

I’m enamored with this crit format because it’s a meeting format where people actually do work (unlike many other types of meetings). In one project, we would meet with a team of stakeholders each week for 3 hours and conduct this format. Prior to this, we couldn’t get them to be in the same room, but once they grasped they had a voice and were moving forward they were hooked.

Try this out on your design team sometime to work out the kinks. It’s a great way to bring the people together and give everyone a chance to sound off on each other work.

Finally, a word to the wise, get a bigger printer! I’ve found that having a larger print out, 11x17 or larger, makes designs easier to see and read.

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