How to Make Sense of “I Don’t Like It”
Designers! We’ve all had the experience of showing our work to someone — usually someone with more power and clout than we have— who looks at our work, shrugs, and says “I don’t like it.”
It could be a client, or a manager, or a colleague. But it’s happened to every single one of us. It’s so frustrating. There’s no acknowledgement of our hard work, no understanding of the decisions we’ve made. And worse, there’s no way of knowing what you should change to make them like it.
It’s easy to blame the stakeholder, of course. They should be giving better feedback! They don’t understand my value! They aren’t listening when I explain my choices! How can I create something they do like if I don’t have clear direction?
The unspoken question in your mind is probably something like: well, how do I make you like it?
Sometimes, this question even starts to cramp our design work. It becomes easy to fall into the trap of saying “I’m not going to design this way, because my product manager doesn’t like it.”
No, no, no. “My PM doesn’t like it” is not useful on its own.
I’ve got some news for you: this lack of useful feedback is not our stakeholders’ problem. The ways we talk about our work in design-only critique aren’t things they have insight into. The language we…
