About the founders

We make evaluators because we care about well-made things. Throughout our careers as designers we’ve learned there are questions you ask about your work, and answer, over and over again. They’re how the design process moves toward quality. Sometimes they’re very functional and basic. Other times they’re driven by curiosities that provoke new ideas. All of it is a way of looking closer at the work, and the closer we look, the better it gets.

As we design, we go through these evaluation cycles, sometimes in our own heads, sometimes out loud in group sessions. Evaluation is a form of critical thinking. We call it the critical loop: observe, question, decide, repeat. Because as designers we observe what we see, existing work or something new we just created. We ask if it can be spaced better, more obvious, simpler. We study the elements and their relationship to each other to make the work read well and look appealing. We scrutinize further to make the designs better than good. Sometimes the answers come immediately. Other times we reach a point where we know we’re not finished, and we need to live with it a little longer. That’s how we know there are questions we haven’t answered yet, and loops we still need to go through. The best designers we know don’t go through these loops just a few times. They go through them obsessively, again and again. The loop is always on. We do it on our own design work and we do it for each other when we’re giving feedback. It’s how we put our best foot forward on everything we design or collaborate on.

In some environments there’s never quite enough time for the loop. But design takes practice and effort. Design takes time. Relentless loops show in the work. People feel it. But when these design loops get skipped, it shows in testing, where we spend our time catching things we should have caught ourselves. That’s slop, and it’s the most expensive way to find it. When agents skip the loop, they do it the way people do, which means slop now comes faster and in volume. So we took what we’d learned over 40 combined years of design, turned the patterns into heuristics, and built tools that nudge every element, screen and flow toward a standard of quality. They’re critical loops. Evals. You can run them on your designs and see exactly what needs to happen next. They’re for anyone who designs, and for the agents that now design too.