Design reviews without the theatre

Design studios have a reputation for the big reveal: weeks of silence, then a darkened room, a dramatic first slide and a pause for applause. We stopped doing that years ago, mostly because it does not work. Clients who see nothing for six weeks arrive with six weeks of private expectations, and the work is judged against a picture in their heads rather than against the brief. The reveal is theatre, and theatre produces reactions, not decisions. Instead, every client sees work every Thursday afternoon, finished or not, in a forty-five-minute slot that always runs the same way.

• Five minutes: what we agreed last week, read aloud from the decision log.
• Ten minutes: the question we need answered today, stated before any work is shown.
• Twenty minutes: the work, on the wall or on the devices it is made for, never on a projector if we can help it.
• Ten minutes: the decision, written down in the room, with the name of the person who made it.

The question comes before the work on purpose. If people know they are being asked whether a typeface carries the voice at small sizes, they look at the typeface at small sizes. If they are simply shown a poster, they comment on the photograph.

Show the unfinished work

We bring work at whatever stage it has reached, including pencil sketches, half-built prototypes and routes we already suspect are wrong. This feels exposed at first, for clients and especially for junior designers, but it is far more efficient. A wrong direction killed in week three costs us a few days; the same direction killed in week nine costs the project its schedule. It also changes the tone of the room. Unfinished work invites people to help shape it. Polished work invites them to judge it.

A review that ends without a decision is just a meeting with nicer pictures.

Who speaks, and in what order

The most senior person in the room speaks last. We ask for this at the first review, and clients almost always agree once they hear why: when the founder speaks first, everyone else quietly adjusts their view to match, and we lose the opinions we most need, often from the people who talk to customers every day. So we go round the table, newest person first, one minute each, before any open discussion. Feedback is framed against the brief rather than taste. “I don’t like green” is a fair thing to feel, but we cannot act on it. “The brief says first-time buyers should feel welcome, and this green reads clinical to me” is something we can work with. We do not police anyone’s wording; we just keep asking the follow-up question until it gets there.

Written down before anyone leaves

The last ten minutes produce one or more lines in the project’s decision log, read back to the room, agreed and sent to everyone the same afternoon. Nobody reopens week three in week nine, including us. A decision can still change later, but it changes in writing, with a reason, rather than drifting because two people remember the meeting differently. Forty-five minutes a week does not sound like much. Across a fourteen-week project it adds up to more than ten hours of a client’s full attention, in small and regular doses, which is roughly the opposite of theatre and a great deal more useful.