Providing The Best Feedback

The best design feedback I receive comes from people who I trust, and I know they have equal trust and respect for me. Trust is a two-way street and it must be established before a designer will receive your feedback with open arms. Show faith in me by never impeding on my ownership of the design process. Show that your goal is the best design outcome for your project and it’s never muddled by personal preferences or competing agendas.

From “try make it pop” to “I’m not really feeling it” – vague design feedback like this can be a designers worst nightmare. Why? Because it means nothing! Before sending your feedback, ask yourself “why?” until you reach a specific piece of feedback. First, make sure you frame your feedback and describe precisely what it applies to (is it color, layout, content design, etc).

Second, be clear. Speak your mind but stay concise. However, if in doubt it’s better to say too much than not enough. Use terms that are concrete, not wishy-washy. Keep everything connected back to your context. “I don’t feel any emotional connection to this hero image. I worry it won’t engage our core audience” is far better than “make it pop”. Comments like this make it much easier for your designer to revisit, revise and rejuvenate.

In order for your designer to make relevant changes, they need to know what you don’t like and why you don’t like it. Provide reasoning for every statement you make and suggest changes that you would like to see.

We are humans that have feelings. We have probably spent hours and hours perfecting the design and it becoming a piece of work that we are really proud of. A little kindness goes a long way and in fact, that second statement is much more constructive.

Dictating your changes to your designer isn’t the most constructive way to get your vision across. Remember that your designer is the expert and they know what works and what doesn’t, so listen to them and trust their decisions.

What ‘modern’ means to you might be something totally different to us. The same goes for any adjective that you use such as ‘bold’ or ‘badass’. You need to tell us what you mean by this and send some visual examples so that we can understand what you mean and how to make the right changes.

This might be the most common offender. Client’s get too prescriptive with their feedback and it drives designers nuts. Instead of providing the how, provide the why. When you’re supplying design feedback, it’s natural to want to offer solutions. But if you knew the best design solutions, you wouldn’t need the expertise of a designer. This goes back to showing trust and respect. Trust that I with your help, will come up with the best solution. So your job isn’t to offer solutions, it’s to frame problems by asking questions.

Instead of the prescriptive request “make the logo 50% bigger”, try “as a new company with little brand recognition, we need to make sure potential customers become familiar with our brand as much as our products. What can we do to make our branding stand out more?” This doesn’t mean offering suggestions is off the table. But you need to frame them as suggestions for one possible solution to explore and compare, rather than a prescriptive demand.

The design feedback process should be a discussion. Rarely do I receive feedback and never reply for clarification. As a designer my job is to question everything. So if you come at me with “make the logo bigger” I will always say “why?”. If you give me a vague “I don’t like this”, I will ask “why not?”. Or I may even say, “but how will your customers react to it?” Be prepared to answer that why every single time. If you don’t have an answer that ties back to your project goals and customer needs, then question whether that piece of feedback has any merit at all. Better yet, provide the why right from the beginning, so I don’t have to ask.

To soften the blow of negative critique, try presenting it as a love sandwich. The two pieces of bread and praise and the filling in the middle is the negative feedback. Start by explaining something you like about the design. Perhaps like “Nice color choice on the links. They really draw attention to the primary calls to action”. Then move on to any area that you have concerns about. “However I’m concerned there are too many competing actions here. We don’t want to overwhelm customers with choice. Can you think of a way to narrow this down to a single primary action?”.

And lastly, follow up with praise again to end on a positive note – either as a repeat of the first praise or something new but related, like “The way you’ve visualised the core message is so simple and compelling. Let’s get that same level of simplicity in the interaction too”.

If you don’t have much positive to say, at the very least, stay kind and respectful at all times. It may take a few rounds of feedback for you and I to get in the same headspace. Be patient. After all, we both have the same goal. We might just disagree on how to get there.

This one can be really challenging for some people because our personal preferences are so innate to our decision making process. But you are not your customers. Your preferences have very little weight unless the product you’re designing is made for you as the sole user. When providing feedback, it’s vital that you remove from the equation as much of your own aesthetic preference as possible. Instead, focus on what your customers will like. What makes them feel they can trust your company. What makes their lives easier.

Your subjective impressions rarely impact heavily on those goals. there should be very little need for comments like “I don’t like this”. Instead, think in term of “our users may not understand this”. Stay objective and aligned with your project goals at all times. Also, keep feedback about the work not the designer. Refrain from using many personal pronouns to describe the design. Use “the screens look unbalanced due to the weight of this content”, rather than “I don’t like how you’ve laid out the content, it looks unbalanced”. The difference is subtle, but it separates the work from the designer, so when I receive that feedback it feels like a critique on the design but not on me personally.