Design Scorecard: a framework for giving feedback
This is a framework to use when you’re looking at a proposed solution to a well-defined design problem, and your goal is to provide feedback so that the solution can be improved. A typical scenario would be a design critique meeting in which the designer in charge of a problem is showing recent work and asking for feedback.
Best practices
Giving effective design feedback is an art. This method will help you with three best practices:
- Identify design goals. If you don’t have clear goals, it’s very hard to evaluate whether a design is successful. Successful at what?
- Get clear on the goals before you begin to evaluate the solution. This will make the process feel more objective and the ensuing conversation more productive.
- Name what is working in addition to what isn’t. On a practical level, this will help to ensure that good stuff doesn’t get forgotten in the next iteration. On an emotional level, this positive reinforcement is like wind in the sail for the people doing the hard work of improving the feature.
First, select your design criteria.
Two or three is typically a good number. Less than two, and you’ll tend to lump everything into one bucket. More than three, and the process will tend to become unwieldy.
Industrial designer Dieter Rams has a famous list of ten design principles that you might choose from. According to Rams, good design is:
- Innovative
- Useful
- Aesthetic
- Makes a product understandable
- Unobtrusive
- Honest
- Long-lasting
- Thorough down to the last detail
- Environmentally friendly
- As little design as possible.
Second, evaluate the design.
For each of your agreed-upon criteria, give three responses:
- A numerical rating on a 1-5 Likert Scale. This forces you to quantify your feedback and gives designers an apples-to-apples comparison.
- One or two things that are working. This gives the designer some positive reinforcement and ideas for what to build on.
- One or two things that could be improved. Since the goal is to improve, this is the meat of the critique.
Visualized, your score card will look like this:
| Criterion | Likert rating | What’s working | What could be improved |
| Useful | 2 | Gives me an at-a-glance picture of this person’s skills | I’m not sure that I can trust the information |
| Easy | 5 | Fits really easily with pre-existing mental models: one person endorsing another… and many people endorsing one person. | I can see how many people endorsed, but I still have to make an inference about what that means. Can we give a takeaway metric? |