1. Be specific and concrete
Deliver feedback with simple words and avoid subjective comments and vague instructions or assumptions like “it’s not fancy enough.”

2. Be open and honest
Be honest and direct with questions and feedback. Nobody benefits if concerns aren’t addressed as soon as they appear.

3. Be aware that design is a process
It takes a lot of time and conversation to produce high quality work. Give your project the room it needs to advance organically.

4. Try answering the question, “Why?”
Instead of a statement like, “I don’t like that color.” try “Why did you choose
that color?” – the answer may both surprise and delight you.

5. Remember, we are all in this together
It’s critical that both the designer and the client understand what the common goal is and that they are both working towards achieving it.

6. Know your process
What enables you to make decisions? What do you need to feel confident with the design? Being aware of that process and how it fits into reviews.

7. Acknowledge when feedback is subjective
When the response is a subjective preference, try to identify and acknowledge it.
It doesn’t mean that the feedback is any less valid, but it does help with
prioritizing revisions.

8. Decide
Building upon decisions is key to moving forward. Make decisions and move on.
Don’t let the project get hung up because you’re unsure. Ask for clarification,
more detail, etc.

9. Celebrate success!
You and your team have worked hard to produce something of quality.

10. Continue refining things
We’ve spent a lot of energy creating a new site, and extending it is easier than starting from scratch. Use the work you’ve done as leverage for continuing to grow.

Auto Tuning from Casey Donahue on Vimeo.

These enhancements, as well as the continual refinement of the OS, make the iPhone a great tool for work. But not all types. Work that is dependent on consumption rather than production is great for mobile devices. But the form factor, lack of sufficiently focused tools and technical limitations like processing power and battery life all make it tough to produce much in an optimized way.

When you are producing work (output) you need quiet space in the interface where you and your tools can focus. You need modal experiences where changing your area of focus is holistic. You need the interface to meld with the way you best use it. Currently the iPhone struggles with some of these needs. The idea of a “workspace” on a phone is a bit tough to buy considering we are all humans and have these big clumsy appendages called fingers. But I don’t think this gets mobile devices off the hook completely.

As an experiment I wrotte this post on my iPhone using Writeroom for the iPhone and it’s painful, but possible. While mobile technology is poised to lead the next big evolution in human-computer interaction, it’s current focus on output over input is something that must begin to change before we can all finally be rid of our large, clunky machines and their wires.

A simple explanation: TweepML is a format to share groups of Twitter users. TweepML.org is a service that allows you to create and manage your lists, and also find other interesting lists to follow.

It’s one of those ideas that is just so simple in origin and elegant in excecution that you can’t help but love it. We don’t do a lot of community projects like this at Design Commission, but it was a lot of fun for us and we hope to keep evolving TweepML.org as its community grows.

Feel free to follow along with the Design Commission crew at TweepML.