Every successful User Experience and Visual Designer evolves their style over time. This evolution happens based on changing points-of-view, understanding of human behavior, communication efficacy, and skillset, among other factors. Whether it be a design style, a communication style, giving and receiving constructive feedback,  what works for one person may not necessarily work for another and often it takes years to develop the right style for you. In this session, we'll explore how several successful UX Designers found (or struggled to find) their voices that lead to their ability to succeed in the industry as well as the challenges that new designers face as they being their career journey.

Throughout every step of any project, we are asked to give or receive feedback. Is this on brand? Does this capture the experience or problem we’re trying to solve? How complicated is this? How do we feel about the way a design looks? Whether we’re discussing this with our internal team, other departments at our company, our clients, our bosses or our peers, the art of giving actionable, useful, contextual and valid feedback is one often lost on all sides.

The challenge with feedback doesn’t end with giving it. Receiving it can be challenging. As people in a creative field, we are setting ourselves up for criticism of our work (and feedback can certainly feel overly critical) every single day. Whether it’s a casual white boarding or brainstorming session to presenting “final” comps to the most important stakeholder, we need to be ready to address whatever reaction people come back with.

The bookends of the feedback experience present separate but very real challenges. They are often challenges that we are never taught to handle - or at least maybe not handle as well as we should.

Over the course of this workshop, we will explore why this is so difficult, the common mistakes on both sides, ways to elicit great feedback and some best practices in turning even the worst feedback into a productive conversation. If anything needs to fit more into a conversation around user experience, around agile, and, indeed, around product, in general, it’s how to keep things moving forward with a truly successful feedback loop.

This workshop will include interactive activities and require participants to give on-the-fly feedback based on the best practices discussed over each part of the presentation.