“I name the exact thing that's working or failing, then say what it does to the user or the product. I like it is a dead end; this hierarchy makes the primary action disappear gives us somewhere to go.”

“I used to give feedback on how something looked or whether I liked it, but that only told people about my taste, not their design. Now I start by asking what problem this is solving and where the user is in their journey, because without that context I’m just projecting my own biases onto the work.”

“I used to say I like it too, until a colleague at the Times asked me what exactly I liked and I had nothing. Now I start with the design’s intent: what problem it’s solving, then what helps or hinders that. This layout might confuse users is more useful than you made a confusing layout.”

“I separate critique into two buckets: objective mechanics and subjective taste. Ask whether the type hierarchy, contrast, and spacing actually guide the eye, or whether a button is getting lost because everything else screams louder. Then say what the design makes you feel and why, even if it's just this corner radius feels too playful for a finance app.”

“I trained myself to separate taste from function by asking what the design is supposed to make happen, then measuring whether it does. If I can’t name the user’s next action, my like is just noise.”

“I stopped saying this is ugly once I realized I was asking the wrong question. Now I ask what the design is solving for, what we have right now, and what the user is trying to achieve.”

“At somethingcreative we used a simple rule: every critique had to name the user problem it solved or created. I like it died fast once people started saying this helps the user finish checkout or this hides the price until too late.”

“I learned to stop critiquing the surface and start naming the tradeoff: what task this design is serving, what assumption it is making, and what will break if that assumption is wrong. I like it usually means I haven't done that work yet.”

“I stopped saying I like it once I realized my job in critique is to separate what works for the user from what I would have done.”