Contribute more than you comment
Now more than ever, there are many ways to collaborate online at work. Google docs, Asana, Figma, and Miro… each week, there seems to be a new service that promises to improve online collaboration.
Along with all this collaboration comes criticism in the form of written comments. Adding comments to critique work is the easiest thing in the world. Just click the comments button and type away; before you know it, you have left ten comments for your collaborator on how they could improve their work.
Now stop for a moment. Let’s imagine you are not on a computer but in a room with the person who created this fragile new piece of work. Would you be so quick to launch into a list of ten things that are wrong or could be improved?
Hmm, maybe you would start by praising some aspects of the work before launching into your critique. Perhaps you would add some context as to why you think something doesn’t work. You might even stand up at a whiteboard and draw or write something to move an idea forward or to clarify a critique.
Neil Postman, a professor of media ecology, wrote that “language is an abstraction about experience, whereas pictures are concrete representations of experience.” If nothing else, this means that there must be more complex and nuanced methods of communication than a comment box.
Yet, the comment box has become our medium for communication: the hammer to fix all your problems, from putting a nail in a wall to fixing your dishwasher. But in reality, the people on the receiving end of your multiple comments are still people with feelings and thoughts. Much like fixing your dishwasher with a hammer, you may get mixed results if you only communicate in a single medium.
This diagram illustrates the range of collaboration communications you could have. On one axis we have the complexity of the problem while the other axis looks at the quality or speed of response. This leaves us with four quadrants.
Conversation
A thoughtful response to a complex problem
Contribution
A thoughtful response to a simple problem
Checklist
Quick response to a complex problem
Comments
Quick response to a simple problem
Conversation
A thoughtful response to a conceptual problem
When you have a complex, open-ended problem, what you need is high-quality collaboration that offers multiple avenues of possible investigation, which for most situations only a person-to-person conversation can offer. Your best bet here is to have an in-person, phone, or video conversation.
This is appropriate for something like:
A planning meeting for a new project
Analysis of raw research
Creating a new idea or concept
Teaching a person a new skill
Yet, too often, organizations use this type of collaboration in inappropriate ways, and this makes this mode of collaboration lose its value. How often have you been in a meeting where you just sat there and listen to someone talk to you for 45 mins?
In-person conversations are valuable pieces of time and mind space; potent and essential, but also to be treated with respect.
Contribute
A thoughtful response to a tactical problem
When you have a tactical problem that could be solved in multiple ways you need a thorough response. Show, don’t tell. In this case, it’s essential to show why you don’t think something works and what could be better. This could be by adding your version of a sentence, sending back a reordered meeting agenda, or creating a quick sketch of your version of a design, making what Postman calls a “concrete expression of experience,”
This kind of considered response allows the other person to clearly understand your thinking and shows that you have put time and effort into a complex problem. In our increasingly asynchronous world, it removes the ambiguity that text alone can often have
Checklist
A quick response to a conceptual problem
When the problem is conceptual and complex but requires a quick response, it is often better to reply with a checklist of actions rather than a specific critique or idea.
Checklists are powerful; consider this example of how a doctor’s simple procedure checklist for intensive care doctors saved lives.
“The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven percent to zero… They calculated that, in this one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.”
How does this apply in design? For example, I often see people offering comments like “you need to think more about the way this interface element interacts with the rest of the webpage”. The “you need to think more” part of that sentence is highly ambiguous. What does that mean, do I sit and think at my desk, do I ask for help, do I start doing more research? Which one is it?
In this case, a checklist comment could look more like this:
“Not sure this interface element works, try:
Defining the problem you are solving
Defining the outcomes the user expects
Looking at how other companies solve this problem, and if they meet the user outcomes you have created.
Creating 3-4 options of designs based on the problem, outcome, and learnings from researching other similar interfaces.”
This checklist helps the person receiving the comment take actionable steps toward solving the problem.
Comment
A quick response to a tactical problem
Change the name of a button, reduce the number of agenda items in a meeting, or change the color of the poster; these are the kinds of comments best suited for the commenting systems we have today. Short to write, easy to understand, and actionable.
They all start with an action (“change”, or “reduce”) with a specific adjustment attached. There is no ambiguity in the request.
In much the same way that we overuse in-person meetings, the value of comments is much reduced if this is the primary medium in which we collaborate with others. People start to ignore comments and important ideas get lost.
Reducing the way we collaborate down to short messages or drawn-out meetings sells us short. So the next time you collaborate with someone, remotely or in person, on any type of project, think about these four modes of communication: conversation, contribution, checklist, and comment. It might change the way you make things together.
Alternatively, you can carry on trying to fix that dishwasher with your hammer 😁
