Creative Grease: Stains on the Driveway of Hot Glue Media

Five Rules for Great Design Feedback

So you’ve hired someone to design a website for you. Congratulations! I bet you’re as proud as a new father awaiting the birth of his first child.

Well, maybe. You’ve talked to your web designers about what you want, and now you’re in the middle of a pile of deadlines and deliverables and stuff that is really important to your business but you don’t know what the hell to do now. Or, you’ve just received a stack (virtual or otherwise) of websites to evaluate, wireframes to look at, or this weird thing called a “design board” that looks nothing like any website you’ve ever seen.

Your child sure is funny-looking at this point and you have no idea what you’re supposed to do with her. So now what?

Rule #1: Know what you’re looking at.

It may sound simple, but it’s easy to get lost in the vast amounts of information that are likely to be coming your way. Are you supposed to be looking at layout? Interactivity? Type and colors? That tiny little thing in the left corner? Maybe we asked you to look at the user experience, but you haven’t a clue what the user experience is.

So what do you do when you’re not sure what to do? Ask. No, really. Just ask. Call, email, tweet, or Facebook message us, and we can walk you through what you need to be looking at, looking for, or otherwise filtering through your brain.

What’s this widget? I don’t understand what ‘accordion menu’ means. And is her head supposed to be shaped that way? Whatever your questions are, we welcome them!

Rule #2: This is business, not art.

I’m going to quote Mike Montiero here, because he said it best:

“…what you’re looking at is not art. It’s not even close. It’s a business tool in the making and should be looked at subjectively like any other business tool you work with. The right question is not, ‘Do I like it?’, but ‘Does this meet our goals?’ If it’s blue, don’t ask yourself whether you like blue. Ask yourself if blue is going to help you sell sprockets. Better yet: ask your design team. You just wrote your first feedback question.”

We don’t expect you to understand design – that’s why we’re here, after all. But you do know your business, and your clients, in a way that we never, ever will. Think about your clients and how they would use, or be impacted by, the proposed designs. Not sure why we did something, or how that will help achieve your goals? Rule #1 again – just ask!

Rule #3: Be honest!

For as much as it’s not art, it’s still your website – and you still need to be proud of it. If you hate the end result, that will show when you market it to your clients. If something’s not working for you, no matter how good of a reason it may have to be doing what it’s doing, or looking like what it’s looking like, tell us, as early and as succinctly as possible. It will let us explore alternatives that we would otherwise not know we needed to explore.

Rule #4: Be as specific and goal-oriented as possible

Believe it or not, “This is awesome!” is as unhelpful a feedback statement as “This sucks!”. It gives us nothing to go on to make the end result even awesomer or less suck-tastic. (Plus, unhelpful feedback draws out the process, because it requires us to attempt mind-reading, something we’re not particularly good at.)

Don’t forget to keep your project goals in mind as you review, and tell us if they’ve changed! We’re working from the project goals set in the original launch meeting, so if they’ve changed and we don’t know, your project will not be a success. Relate your feedback to your goals, and we’ll be able to move your project along swiftly and successfully.

So, how about some examples of unhelpful vs. helpful feedback?

Unhelpful: “It’s too busy”.
Helpful: “It’s too busy in the lower right corner of the page – there’s a lot of information here, and I’m worried that visitors to the site will miss the call to action and not sign up for our sprockets newsetter.”
Why: The helpful feedback is incredibly specific, and relates directly to one of the site’s goals – in this case, to get newsletter signups.

Unhelpful: “I don’t like red and grey.”
Helpful: “The combination of red and grey is difficult to read.”
Why: The helpful feedback calls out a specific problem – contrast – which we can then address.

Unhelpful: “Make the text size larger and change the red to purple.”
Helpful: “The combination of red and grey is difficult to read. Is there something we can do, such as change the text size, to make it more readable?”
Why: Again, the helpful feedback calls out a specific problem – contrast and readability – which we can then address with the user in mind, in a way that just changing the color or text size may not accomplish.

Rule #5: Invisible feedback is unhelpful feedback

Let’s say you have two internal stakeholders for your project, Mark and Bob. Mark wants a green website, because he thinks green attracts money, and Bob wants a website with an animated clown in the footer, because he read somewhere that animated clowns are the hip new thing, and it’ll make your company look more tech-forward.

If you come back to us with feedback that says “change the color to green and add an animated clown”, we’re going to be rather hard-pressed to relate those two changes to your project’s goals (not to mention a bit confused). However, if you come back to us with “Mark wants a green website, because he thinks green attracts money, and Bob wants a website with an animated clown in the footer, because he read somewhere that animated clowns are the hip new thing, and it’ll make your company look more tech-forward.”, we’ll be able to relate that feedback to your goals and possibly make some compromises (a non-animated clown, perhaps?) along the way.

In other words, tell us why you want the changes you want, not just what they are.

Wrap-Up: Why does it all matter?

It matters because good design feedback is more important to you than it is to us.

• Each bit of good design feedback brings your project one step closer to the end result! (Unhelpful design feedback is a step or two back.)
• Good design feedback makes it clear to everyone what the next steps are! (Unhelpful design feedback can lead to mind-reading and guesswork, a frustrating process for everyone involved.)
• Good design feedback keeps your project on schedule! (Unhelpful design feedback draws out a project through otherwise unnecessary iterations and revisions.)
• Good design feedback keeps your project on track to meet its goals! (Unhelpful design feedback can derail a project quicker than just about anything else.)
• Good design feedback ensures that your baby grows up into a beautiful young woman! (Unhelpful design feedback pretty much guarantees she’ll want her tongue pierced before she’s thirteen.)

So what now?

Ask lots of questions, be specific as possible, and you’ll have a beautiful baby girlsuccessful project in no time.

Dani made this mess on May 25th, 2011 and filed it under Random Drips