Plus, bouncing ideas around (or “brainstorming” or “workshopping”) can have an incredible effect on creativity and problem-solving. In these scenarios, each party is feeding off and building on the other’s input and responses, resulting in a larger, more diverse pool of ideas, increasing the likelihood of those evasive really good ideas getting sparked.
On the other hand, text-based feedback (comments, edits, etc.) leaves so much room for misinterpretations. Not to mention it can be isolating, alienating, and discouraging — Hell, even infuriating. Who among us hasn’t felt a twinge of resentment when seeing what we view as an unwarranted revision to our beautiful writing?
Two-way conversations around feedback make it easier to get on the same page (heh) by exploring each party’s creative choices — and the perspectives behind them — creating opportunities for both the writer and the reviewer to learn and be inspired in the process.
Let’s get practical: How to give two-way feedback For all the productivity benefits of conversational feedback, what does this look like in practice?
At first glance, the obvious downside of this feedback approach is that nobody has time to have actual real-time chats every time they need to offer or solicit feedback — never mind in-person meetings.
With the rise of remote collaboration, flexible schedules, and globally-distributed teams, finding a mutually convenient time for a meeting or call is only getting more challenging. Studies have shown that constant meetings and task-switching are massively disruptive to getting deep, focused work done.
Luckily, we live in the age of asynchronous collaboration. There’s a growing number of amazing technologies that make working together asynchronously not just as effective as collaborating in real-time, but more so.
Allow us to introduce bubbles, the perfect async collaboration tool for giving feedback in context and turning that feedback into a productive two-way conversation.
Bubbles is a free collaboration tool that lets you make screen recordings and annotate time-stamped comments using text or voice or screen recordings (with or without a webcam).
This means you can make a video where you scroll through your feedback and highlight key points, explain your suggestions in more detail, and ask the writer questions you didn’t feel like typing out — all with the benefit of being able to use your voice and facial expressions to convey your tone.
The writer can then watch the video and respond in context by annotating comments to the relevant part of the video, and you can respond in turn, creating conversation threads that are nicely contained and easy to find and reference going forward.
And as we mentioned, with bubbles, you can leave comments using text, voice, video, or screen recordings. This means you can tailor the format of your feedback conversation to your needs (and level of comfort).