The outcome of your design project can hinge on great design feedback. Here’s how to do it.
If you’re a business owner or executive who is hiring a designer or design team to create web design, graphic design, product design, or any design elements for any aspect of your business, you need to have a clear understanding about the best ways to give great design feedback to receive product design you are happy with.
Business owners who provide effective design feedback are more likely to get design assets that better align with their vision, which can improve marketing metrics, attract more customers, and provide a better overall customer experience.
We’ve adapted Gartner’s “Approaches for CAEs to Obtain Quality, Objective Feedback” to help provide business owners with concrete ways to improve their design feedback processes.[1]
What is design feedback, and why is it important?
Feedback is essential to the success of any design project. Because the designer or design team you hired isn’t designing for themselves, they need to be given the tools and feedback necessary to succeed. This includes creating and delivering a comprehensive design brief, understanding what steps of the design process they’ll be involved in, and knowing which stakeholders will be communicating with them during the design process.
Good design feedback can speed up projects and get the result you envisioned, while bad feedback can slow things to a crawl and provide you with a finished product that doesn’t quite hit the mark, leading to costly redesigns or a failure to sell the product.
How to give effective and actionable design feedback
Create a simple design review and revision process by setting expectations
When many stakeholders are involved, the design review and feedback process can become muddied and complicated. Suppose you have more than one person providing feedback on a design. In that case, it’s a good idea to create a design review and revision process that covers every stakeholder’s responsibilities and the time they need to provide feedback.
A simple design revision process requires a few things:
Determine who the key stakeholders for the project are
Prove a design brief so everyone is on the same page
Define milestones for revisions (deadline for first, second, and third revisions, etc.)
Consolidate feedback for the product designer if multiple stakeholders are involved
Using project management software can help make juggling these stakeholders and processes easier in a few ways:
Collaboration tools facilitate communication and collaboration among team members through built-in messaging systems, discussion threads, or file sharing.
Reporting/project tracking generates reports and performance metrics to track progress and analyze data in order to gain insights into the project.
Task management features help create, assign, and organize tasks that allow you to set priorities, due dates, and task dependencies.
Project planning features help create project plans, define project objectives, set milestones, and establish project timelines.
Direct your feedback at the design, not the designer
The goal of providing negative or positive feedback is to create a design that represents your vision, and you hired a designer to help you execute that vision. If, after their first iteration, you see room for improvement, don’t automatically assume that the designer didn’t execute; they don’t live inside of your skull and are just using the information you provided them.
Don’t:
Say things like “Don’t take it personally” or “No offense.”
Use the word “you” when referring to the design.
Insult the designer’s ability to create something you like.
Do:
Use examples from the design itself as a reference for your feedback.
Keep your feedback about the design elements.
Provide honest, direct feedback about what you like and don’t like about the design.
By keeping your feedback centered on the design, you can frame negative feedback in a way that helps the designer iterate more effectively moving forward. If you’re attacking their ability with your negative feedback, they’re less likely to produce something that both parties are happy with.
Be specific and constructive
You want the negative or positive feedback you provide to be specific and constructive, and your designer also wants that. It will make their job easier and ensure you get the final product you are happy with. That’s why you should implement the FAIR[1] model of providing feedback to ensure the feedback exchange between stakeholders and designers is meaningful and objective. It should focus on facts, actions observed, the impact of the actions, and the resulting recommendations.
F | A | I | R |
|---|---|---|---|
Facts (not judgments) | Actions observed | Impact of the actions | Recommendation |
Avoid judgments by describing specifically the situation according to facts.
| Describe the actions or behaviors you observed with examples. | Analyze the impact of actions by considering what you or others thought or felt. | Recommend new actions or behaviors that would have resulted in a better experience based on the previous factors. |
The FAIR model makes example-based feedback actionable and objective. A conversation based on the FAIR model should be a two-way dialogue to develop greater trust.
The last thing you want is for your design feedback to be unclear or too broad. That can lead to a drawn-out design process that leaves you unsatisfied with the final result.
If your response to your designer asking for feedback about what you’d like to see is, “I’ll know it when I see it,” you likely haven’t done enough research about your vision in the first place.
Be open to different perspectives
You hired a designer or a design team because of their expertise, so if they suggest what might work best for the design project, you should, at the very least, consider it before dismissing it outright. After all, their career and entire focus is design and creation, so you should trust they have more expertise than you about what will resonate with your audience.
That’s not to say that you should have no control over the final product, but it’s important to trust your designer. That’s why providing constructive, specific, actionable feedback is so important. They can turn your vision and ideas into a design that will help your project or business succeed.
When to give design feedback
Share feedback early and often. The earlier in the design process you can provide specific, constructive feedback about what’s working and not working with the design, the better.
Oftentimes, your gut reaction to a design might not be fully thought out, so it’s important to not give design feedback on a whim. Take time to look at the design, compare it against the brief you gave your designer, and set up a time to chat about any changes instead of just providing the first bit of feedback that pops into your head.
One of the fastest ways to slow your design project down to a crawl is to ask a designer to go back and change something about the already approved design. That’s where having a simple design revision process will come in handy. Any major changes to the composition or general direction of the design project should be fleshed out during the initial sketches.
A designer should provide you with several iterations of what the design might look like early on so that they can then collect feedback about what you like or dislike about each one. Then, they can take that and move forward by focusing completely on that composition.
If, after they’ve devoted time to fleshing out that vision, you decide you like another one of the sketches better, that will lead to frustration and, more importantly, a higher cost for your business.
Many designers will have a flat rate but will include clauses in their contracts that will give them wiggle room to charge more if the scope and scale of the project exceed what was initially agreed upon.
The last thing the designer or design team wants is to design something you’re not thrilled about, so providing feedback as early and often as possible is the best way to ensure you receive the product you want.
The outcome of your design project can hinge entirely on the feedback you provide
We might sound like a broken record here, but your designer doesn’t live in your brain. They can only help visualize your vision if they’ve been allowed to by considering your constructive feedback.
That’s why creating a simple design review and revision process is important: setting expectations, directing your feedback at the design, not the designer, being specific and constructive, and being open to different perspectives.
Most businesses don’t have in-house designers, so collaborating and hiring either freelance designers or a design agency will be standard. If you have more specific needs, you can hire an agency specializing in particular areas like graphic design, logo design, user experience design, or web design.
If you need more help with different elements of design for your business, check out these other great resources: