What did you think of Feedback Frenzy?

Hello everybody, and congratulations on a great week! The last of the notes are trickling in with all your great comments + critiques. Pretty soon the admins will be cloistered away rating them all - but first we wanted to see what you thought about the contest!


We've been promising that we'll run another contest like this one, and we certainly will! To that end we'd really like to get your feedback on this one - what did you like and where were places where you see room for improvement? Let us know in the comments below!

We've put together a few questions to get the discussion going!

1. What was your overall impression of the contest? Did you like enjoy being a part of it?

   

2. Teamwork was a big piece of this! What did you think of being paired with different artists?

   

3. This contest was about both giving and receiving feedback - how was the balance?

   

4. How did this experience compare to other competitions you've seen on deviantART?

   

5. What was your favorite part of the week?

   

6. Your turn to be admin! What would you do differently?

   

7. Next time we run this contest, will you play again?

   

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We all put a lot into this (admin and participant alike) - and we got quite a lot out of it too! We asked for the best comments deviantART had to offer, and you delivered! So now we want to hear from the group and find out what everyone thought of the experience!



TEAMS + GROUPS

• No teams at all! Individual contest.

  While we agree that teams are not strictly necessary for this competition, we had our reasons for including them! Part of our goal was to encourage the development of a critiquing community (that means more than just a one-on-one interaction with the artist)!
  
  

  • A system where individuals give and receive feedback among their peers.

  
  

  • Close interaction with other critics in a critiquing environment.

  
  

  • Friendly competition based on quality of constructive criticism

  
  

  • Some interdepence on other critics, motivation based on responsibility.

  
  Enough people enjoyed the team aspect that we will likely keep it around in some capacity. However, we'll definitely be sure to include major individual opportunities as well! Read below for some possible solutions!

• Sign up as either an individual or a team.

  What if for future competitions, you could choose to play individually OR opt to be placed in a team? This way each participant can choose their own competitive environment!

• Create your own teams!

  Another great idea! We thought about doing this for the first one, but thought that it might stack the deck too much. However by putting your own teams together you ensure that you are with a good group of people!

• Group by medium/timezone.

  The goal for this contest was to group you by different media as there's a lot to be said for a fresh perspective! In the future though, we'd love to try some medium-centric teams! As for timezones, we'll be running monthly chat events with ProjectComment at different times of the day! This will be a great way to meet people from your part of the world and perhaps put together a team!

• Larger teams (5 to 6 people).

  Definitely taking this one into consideration, it will help dilute the effects of inactivity but still make for a close group.

• Require intra-commenting between team members.

  We didn't want to put too many requirements on this iteration, but we definitely hoped that deviants would start by critiquing their team!

• More focus on team communication + activities.

  For future team-based contests (and individual ones) this will definitely be at the top of our list! We had a lot of team-focused events and activities planned, but didn't have time to get to them all with how busy projecteducate was! Here are some of the things we had planned (and will include at some point).
  
  

  • Introductions - A thread for the meet and greet! Introduce yourself to your team members and say why you like to comment!

  
  

  • Flash Feedback - All team members comment on a deviation together, group critique style.

  
  

  • Critique-Off - Pair up with another team and critique each other's work! A battle to the finish!

DEVIATIONS

• Sort them better (by medium or team)!

  This one is all ziinyu's fault! We only realized that we wanted a sorted collection about 6 hours before the start of the contest, and by that time it was too late to do them all by hand! So instead we just converted our participant list (where we had sorted you based on self identified medium) into the thumbnail post. Next time better organization for sure!

• Ensure better distribution of critiques.

  This is by far the most difficult part of running a contest like this! We'd like to ensure that everyone receives comments evenly, but we have very little control over what you guys choose to critique! Most solutions involve limiting the amount of comments you can give, and we didn't really want to do that! Some possible options below.

• Limit number of critiques for each piece.

  We debated a version of this for a long time in the back room before ultimately deciding against it. We came to the conclusion that we didn't want to do anything to limit your ability to critique. If you see a piece you want to critique, you critique it. It has to be that simple.

• Include questions/concerns in the deviation description.

  A fantastic suggestion, we will definitely be including it in the next version!

• Shuffle the order in the gallery.

  Logistically, this one is tricky, but if we come up with an easy way to do it, we'll implement it for sure! In the meantime, we'll more heavily promote other methods of viewing deviations.

• Highlight non-critiqued deviations.

  We are developing a method of doing this as we speak! Ideally we'd be able to update a blog once a day with the deviations ordered by critiques received (so that it's easy to find the under-commented ones)! More information below.

PRIZES/RATING

• Award individuals too! MVP recognition.

  Mum's the word on this one - wait until prizes are announced for this contest first!

• Rate based ONLY on quality (not quantity).

  Part of the fun of this contest (we feel) is the intensity of it! For this reason, we do want to encourage people to write a lot of comments! HOWEVER, we would like to stress that quality means significantly more than quantity. The possibility is still open of doing a version of the contest where quantity is controlled or doesn't matter at all.

• Bonus points for rating empty deviations.

  The difficulty with this kind of incentive is that the early bird gets a pretty big worm - it will be hard to balance it for those that start later.

• Bonus points for critiquing outside of your medium.

  We'll need to figure out how to implement it, but this is a great idea for encouraging more cross-media feedback!

• Make the rubric more transparent.

  Good idea! We don't want it to be so obvious that it becomes a checklist - but we would like to talk a bit more about what we are looking for in your critiques!

• Participation reward for number of critiques.

  There's no accounting for quality here! We like the idea of participation being rewarded, but have to figure out a good system for it first.

GENERAL

• Greater variety (in medium).

  This is all dependent on who signs up! If you'd like to help promote it to the smaller communities, we would be very thankful!

• Longer time limit than a week!

  Definitely something that we will be playing around with in the future (in both directions). Some events might be two weeks, while others might be 24 hours or less!

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So what's the end result of this? We have a lot of wonderful suggestions and a lot of possible directions to take future contests! It's looking like each contest will be a little different. Variety is the spice of life right? So we'd like to keep it interesting by continuing to develop the structure as we go, and offering you different opportunities with each competition!

Some might be individual only, others might have a strong focus on teams! We might take one and split it based on medium, or run another one rewarding exploration outside your field! There are a lot of fantastic things to come at FeedbackFrenzy and we'd like to continue hearing your thoughts and ideas!

Lastly we'd like to talk about a big development that's been happening in the backroom in the past few days. Originally created to help with the rating process, ziinyu (with the guidance of parallellogic) has put together a method of quickly and efficiently gathering data around deviantART (specifically within this group). We are now capable of obtaining near real time data on the comments you are leaving! What does this mean? A number of things!

• The next time we run this competition, we won't need you to keep track of your [links] to comments, we can find them automatically!
• Since we can track which deviations are receiving critiques, we can help highlight those that are still in need of them!
• We will be able to provide statistics/counts for the ongoing competition!
• This also opens the door to help facilitate more complicated contest structures!