Am I Ready to Get Feedback? A Taxonomy of Factors Creators Consider Before Seeking Feedback on In-Progress Creative Work

ABSTRACT Receiving feedback on preliminary work allows content creators to gain insight and improve outcomes. However, many creators only share in-progress work at late stages of the creative process and lose opportunities to address conceptual issues in the work. To contribute to the base of knowledge of factors that shape one’s decision to seek feedback on their work, we conducted 24 semi-structured interviews with creators in product, interaction and graphic design domains. The results yielded a taxonomy of process-related, social, and cognitive factors that affected a creator’s choice to seek feedback. Next, we administered a survey to quantify the prevalence of these factors at different design stages and for different levels of expertise. Our results show feedback strategy varies by expertise—experts are more likely to create personal deadlines to seek feedback than novices—and by stage. At the early stage, creators sought feedback when testing multiple alternatives. At the late stage, creators are most likely to consider revision granularity prior to seeking feedback. We demonstrate future possibilities for new features in creativity tools through speculative design sketches motivated by our findings.