semiBad

No-one’s a Critic

A couple of days ago, my friend and colleague Gavin Logan wrote a short post which has got me thinking about criticism (or lack thereof) in the local web community:

“ A local web design agency that I used to admire has started to churn out insipid work. It’s made me think about this aversion we have for talking publicly about this kind of thing. I don’t want to name them, and I’d consider it rude if I did, but I don’t know where this politeness comes from. ”

While I don't know which agency he's referring to, I'm more than familiar with this situation, both from my time in the North East and previously. While criticism is a vital element of the design process it's a tricky area even under the best circumstances – for instance, between good friends or long-time associates. As Gavin says, giving polite yet firm feedback to local designers and agencies – and lets face it, we're often talking about competitors here – is next to impossible.

The little things

Of course this isn't universally true. Small or mostly technical issues are fairly simple to give amicable feedback for – obvious bugs (a textfield being misaligned) or easy-to-fix styling issues (the body text is too low contrast against the background). Very rarely do people get up in the air about receiving feedback aimed at polishing a live site on day one. Bigger issues than this – fundamental issues with design, poor build quality throughout, or just being thoroughly mediocre – are a little harder to put in delicate terms.

Of course, whether they should be put in delicate terms in the first place is basically the issue at hand. Not so long ago Brendan Dawes called for more honest criticism and less "yeah, awesome!!1" in British web design. This seemed to be aimed pretty squarely at the 'speakers dinner' clique, but the subsequent comments included some questions about the appropriateness of criticising other designer's work in the public space:

“ I can think of work that friends have done recently that I was truly appalled by, but couldn't see any point in declaring a live site shit in the name of honesty. Certainly not on Twitter. The place for that is a one to one chat over a pint. ”

Though I'm not sure this helped combat the idea that a clique of celebrity designers were the only ones who should be giving any negative feedback to each other, I do think that it makes a decent point – public criticism is something to be wary of.

Putting it out there

During my degree (which was based in traditional graphic design) crit sessions were regular, relatively public, and occasionally brutal. Even then, there were people that handled criticism well, and people who felt that every piece of feedback was a personal slight that would one day be avenged – if not by them, then by their sons. This is delicate enough in a situation where criticism is enforced and expected – and most importantly, where it has no impact on your current and future success (except as an opportunity for learning).

What's being described in Gavin's post is, of course, a completely different environment – post launch, on a project which a client has likely already paid for. A studio should be its own critic well before the public ever gets to comment, and even freelancers (I hope across the board) turn to a network of people whose opinions they trust, to get new perspectives on work in progress. Once the work is launched, it's another story – even if they were to agree with incoming criticism, the prospect of going back to a client to say "we did this wrong" is an uninviting one. Put bluntly, by the stage Gavin's talking about, it's too late for criticism to be useful – counterintuitive though it might seem.

Critical voices vs. Critical noise

Gavin also makes the point that criticising the Apples and Microsofts of the the world is a lot easier. This is basically a corollary of the multitude of theories regarding the effects of anonymity on user behaviour – if you knew for a fact that the designer from BigCorp (the same one who implemented that ludicrous colour scheme) was definitely going to read your scathing feedback, then you'd probably have used slightly calmer language. When there's thousands of us complaining that something, that's critical noise – we expect the recipient to respond to the weight of criticism, rather than the individual sentiments themselves. It's no coincidence that we're much more likely to exaggerate for effect – when there's six thousand other comments, you're far more likely to upgrade "the colours don't complement each other" to "this colour scheme made my eyes divorce my brain / skull and now the rest of me has to live under a bridge – THANKS MS OFFICE".

When I recently tweeted some fairly harsh words about the documentary Erasing David (which was about to be reshown on Channel Four), I was pretty surprised when David Bond responded a day or so later. Would I have worded that original tweet differently if I'd known the filmmaker would personally read it?

Let the market sort it out

The simple answer then, is that we don't criticise sites after launch – if an agency is making shoddy work, then the likelihood is that they'll either realise and get their act together, or lose all their clients / talent and eventually go out of business. This is akin to how John Hicks (rightly in my opinion) explains the perceived sycophancy of the UK web scene in the previously linked comment – people make noise when they love something, and stay quiet when they don't. We work in an environment where noise means page views, links, and recommendations – all things which a successful studio or designer needs.

But Gavin's right – in a field where every smart voice (historical and contemporary) says that honest and open critique is vital, why isn't there more of it? In an industry where the ongoing brief is to create cool, intuitive new ways to communicate ideas and concepts, why is this such a taboo subject? What we're doing is counterintuitive – and that usually means we're doing it wrong.