According to UX Collective, designers should follow these steps to make your feedback process pain-free and maximise usefulness.
Set a process and clear expectations
If your clients suck at providing feedback, much of the blame falls on you for not educating them in how to do it well. Before you ask for your first round of feedback, explain this to your client:
Precisely what you want feedback on (so your client focuses on the right things). At this stage in the project, are you worried about navigation, layout, typography, content, colour, etc. Ask for specific feedback with a specific goal in mind.
What type of feedback is most useful?
Who is providing feedback? Is this a single person or a committee? Is there one point of contact who will be responsible for consolidating all feedback for you? Is there one person’s voice who has the power to overrule the others? You need to understand the dynamics of the feedback group. The bigger the group, the more likely that it will have conflicting feedback, so encourage your client to downsize that core group as much as possible to keep things focused.
How do you want to receive feedback? In-person? By phone or email? Consider how you are most comfortable in receiving feedback, and what format is most efficient for your design process. I often say “Please consolidate all of your feedback and post it as InVision comments, so we can keep discussions in a single place, and in-context.”
What timeframe you expect the feedback to be complete? Twenty-four hours? One week? These timeframes greatly impact on the project’s momentum and should have been agreed upon as part of your initial engagement. I usually request “Please provide feedback within 24 hours. If that’s not possible, please notify me so I can adjust my schedule accordingly.”
Your clients aren’t mind-readers. It’s your responsibility to set these expectations and continue to remind your client about them until you feel that you’re both on the same page and have a mutual understanding of what is needed for successful design process.
Start early and ask often
Gone are the days of the big reveal from the celebrity designer, when you present a nearly finished concept to your clients and hope for a “wow” response. Especially with digital products, it’s essential to start the feedback and iteration process as early as possible, because the best work is deeply collaborative. Don’t head too far down any path without feedback first. This keeps things efficient and on-budget, which will please your business-conscious clients. Aim for frequent small updates and continuous feedback rather than large chunks of work with occasional feedback between. This has the added benefit of making your client feel more involved too.
Stay open-minded and don’t take it personally
Take critique with grace and dignity. Never get defensive. Remember your client is only trying to help you create the best design outcome. Critique of your design is not personal. Your client may see things from a very different perspective than you, and that perspective is valuable. The feedback process is the most important way for you to improve as a designer, so take everything constructively and try to learn and grow from it. Lose your ego and stay open-minded to ideas no matter where they come from. If you must shoot-down an idea, use data and experience to justify your thinking. Stay polite at all time, even if you feel your client isn’t.
Clarify and find the root of the cause
Ask why? all the time! If your client doesn’t provide adequate justification for their requests, demand it. If feedback gets too prescriptive or subjective, focus back to goals and metrics for project success, and frame your clarifying questions in those terms to force the ensuing discussion down the right path. Don’t end that discussion until you’re satisfied and fully understand the motivation behind that piece of feedback. Question your own assumptions too! As a designer it’s easy to get stuck in a rut and keep reusing the same design solutions over and over. But the right solution for one project may be wrong for another. Learn to step back from your work from time to time to question yourself.
Present better solutions and know how to justify them.
If your client requests a design solution that you believe is inferior to your ideas, show it to them anyway. And then present your “better” solution along with it as comparison. This ensures your client that you’re listening to their ideas rather than dismissing them, so they feel they don’t lose control of the outcome.
You must be able to clearly articulate why you think one potential solution is better than another. Talk in a simple language your client will understand. Remember, you are encouraging your client to keep things objective and goal-oriented, so you must do the same. You’re not allowed to say “I like this option better” without backing that up with a strong mixture of: UX logic, industry experience, user testing, hard data from other sources, and industry best-practices. If you take this approach, often your client will agree with your preferred solution. And after repeating this process a few times you will earn their trust and find they allow you more freedom in your design decision making.
Sometimes you’ll have clients who seems to love everything you produce, and offer very little feedback. This can feel wonderful and make for a quick and smooth design process. However, does it produce the best design outcome? Even the best of us don’t always get things right the first time around. Critical examination through someone else’s eyeballs is an important part of the design process, and it often forces us out of our comfort zones to discover better design solutions.
If your client is too full of love and not enough critique, push them a bit harder to uncover the more subtle concerns they may have. They might be too polite to bring something up. They may not be thinking in the right terms, because you haven’t set expectations clearly. Force them to play devil’s advocate or view the design from a different perspective to find areas that could use improvement. The final design will be better off with as much scrutiny as possible.
Source: https://uxdesign.cc/how-to-give-and-receive-great-design-feedback-ca5e37eea4b9
Workshop Challenge
For this week, I have decided to discuss the activation platform stands with my peers from my workplace. I have received very little feedback/opinion on the Ideas Wall. I have received one positive suggestion from one of my cohort peers. The suggestion was to utilize a digital billboard for the launch. I loved the idea; however, this type of billboard is not available here in the Middle East.
I have taken feedback from my designer colleagues and production designers about the working of each stand version (external and internal) and the amends required regarding dismantling and the effects on design. As mentioned before, the same stand utilized for the launch event will also be used for the in-mall activation. I shall be producing a total of two stands for the launch campaign. I have worked very closely with my colleagues and production specialists to come up with the best designs and options in line with the overall strategy of launching the car to showcase the latest technology and connectivity. There was a lot of testing involved for all the technology to be connected and working. Also, there has been the integration with the VR technology to transfer the experience virtually. The second stand platform will have a huge screen as the background of the stand. This huge screen shall be displaying the brand videos of the car and showcasing Nissan’s Mobility features. There will be promoters all around to guide the customers/visitors to experience the interior of the car and the VR technology. Then, customers can queue for taking a test drive around the city of Manama and the Bahrain Bay area. The stand will still follow the illuminating theme that’s used across all the other executions with the base being lit with blue LED.
Omar Mal,
December 3, 2020
Omar Mal 