Welcome to Workspaces: Getting feedback and testing your designs
Get useful, organized feedback on your designs and prototypes at every stage of the design process
In this series, we’re showing you how to make the most of your Workspace — from organizing designs and staying in sync to sharing them with people inside and outside your Workspace, getting feedback and sending designs for handoff.
In this post you’ll learn how to use comments and threads to give feedback on documents and prototypes. We’ve all been there — one quick comment sparks a big discussion and suddenly your feed is cluttered with detailed feedback.
When you’re working on a project, it’s easy to focus on the details — sometimes it can be hard to take a step back, or see things from another perspective. That’s why feedback from others is so important.
Your Workspace has all the tools you need to test your designs, get useful feedback at the moments you choose, and create your best work.
Get better design feedback with comments
Sometimes it can be hard to keep track of all the feedback people have given you — from calls to DMs, it can all quickly get mixed up. Thankfully, your Workspace offers a simple way to see all your feedback in one place, and in context. You can leave comments on any Artboard, so you can easily refer to something specific in the design and help other people understand what you mean.
When a comment is no longer helpful or if you want to rephrase something, you can always delete or edit comments.
Keep feedback tidy with comment threads
We’ve all been there — one quick comment sparks a big discussion and suddenly your feed is cluttered with detailed feedback. A small comment can turn into a heated discussion pretty quickly and clutter the main feed. While discussion is great, it can overshadow other bits of valuable feedback and make it hard to navigate through the conversation. That’s where threads can help.
Threads are great to keep discussions organized and make it easy to keep track of conversations. With threads, your copywriters can discuss language choices while your designers chat about colors and composition — and it’s still easy to follow each conversation, and action anything you need to.
Comments that already have a thread will show the number of replies underneath them instead of a Reply link. Threads that you haven not open will show the number of replies in orange, while those you have read will appear grey.
Stay in the loop with notifications
As more people offer their feedback on your work, it can be tough to stay on top of it all — especially if you’re part of a few different projects. When this happens, you can manage your notifications to make sure you don’t miss a thing. You can choose to follow just one Artboard, a few different ones, or even a whole document. And once you’re done, you can turn notifications off to reduce the noise, and focus only on the feedback you need.
When you follow a document or Artboard, a notification will pop up in the bell icon in the top-right corner of the window every time theres a new comment.
When comments and threads in the web app start to get very long, it can be useful to jump on a call to discuss things further and decide on clear next steps.
Bring your designs to life with prototypes
Prototypes are perfect for stress-testing your designs with users and making in-progress work feel real to clients and others outside your design team. Not only do they help everyone understand your product’s flow, they can also help you discover stumbling blocks you may not have anticipated.
Set a Start Point so your Prototype starts from there. If you don’t set a Start Point, it will start from whichever Artboard you currently have selected.
You can preview prototypes in the Mac app by clicking the Preview button in the toolbar, or in the web app — you’ll find them at the top of the document overview. Once you are ready to share your Prototype with other people, just set the link’s permissions to View and copy the link. Anyone you share it with will be able to jump straight in and start testing.
If you want to gather feedback, you can enable comments on your document so that anyone in your Workspace can leave their comments at the same time they are testing your Prototype. You can also disable comments in Artboards if they are not ready for feedback yet.
Want to give your testers a little helping hand? You can choose to highlight Hotspots in your Prototype preview, which is great when you are at the early stages and your design only has a few working flows. Enabling Hotspots will highlight any Hotspots or links in the Prototype, making it easy for people to know where to click. When you’re ready to really put your design to the test, you can choose to disable Hotspots, and let users figure out how the design works for themselves.
If someone wants to explore or leave comments on a specific Artboard, they can jump straight to it from the Prototype preview.
What’s next?
In our next post, we’ll show you all the tools in your Workspace that help ensure a smooth handoff of your designs to developers. We’ll see you next week!
