Could you just nudge that a bit? No, not that much…
Feedback. 😱
You either love it or hate it. But you do need it. We all need it, if we’re trying to make things the best they possibly can be of course. Usually, people think it’s one way traffic, like you’re being handed down something or being served. With no opportunity to push back or fight your corner.
“Can you believe the feedback Client X gave us on our colour choice for the inner lining of the hero tote bag?”
“I’m shocked that Design Studio Y ignored what we asked them to do with the semi-transparent gradient on our Keynote title page.”
During handover for one of our clients, they replied with this, specifically about one file, “Scenario 6 005 is in the folder twice — one of them should be labelled Scenario 6 007…Bond, James Bond.” 🔫 You see, feedback can also be way to actually improve communication, relationships and trust between people. Back to that in a bit.
The reality is feedback can improve design and it can validate design. Or feedback can confuse design or destroy design.
But it’s always a story of two sides, communicating and listening. One can’t exist without the other. Both skills are required by people for feedback to do the job it’s meant to do. If someone gives feedback without being open to a response, it’s not feedback, it’s an opinion. If someone just hears without clarifying what’s being communicated, there’s the danger of the next solution moving even further away from the mark.
Ultimately, if you want to make feedback something to look forward to, you have to help people to give and receive feedback properly, and you have to practice the same yourself.
Let’s start with communicating. First, here are two scenarios from someone giving feedback:
- “Can you move the Twitter and Instagram social buttons to the left?”
- “We would like to make it easy for our users to discover our social media channels, as we want to focus more on building our social audience than our competitors currently do.”
One is prescriptive, and one is descriptive, can you guess which is which? Scenario two describes the problem (and why it’s a problem), instead of telling you how to fix an arbitrary issue. So the golden rule of communicating feedback well, to quote, is:
“If something isn’t working, tell me why and I’ll fix it. I want to earn money.” — Paul Jarvis
Be honest, but polite.
Explaining that you don’t like something in a rude and bolshy way only makes the feedback you’re giving less effective. The person will be focussing on you, rather than the details that count.
Say it how you want to say it and be direct about it.
All designers should be in the business of saving time and streamlining processes so making feedback flowery is just as ineffective as saying it in a rude way. Make sure you get to the point.
Try not to point.
It sounds counter-productive to not physically show where the problem lies, but communicating feedback doesn’t need aggressive finger wagging. Instead, encourage the person you’re giving the feedback to be the pointer, and guide them whilst they do it. They will be able to locate the problem you’re commenting on, let’s say if it’s on a web page or a specific area of a magazine layout, and this actually gives them the opportunity to explain their decisions as to why it’s ended up the way it has. This might help you understand and see things in a different way, making that specific feedback point not even relevant. Time is saved and the best solution is potentially already in place.
So what about listening to feedback you receive? Here are the two scenarios from the feedback receiver’s point of view, they’ve listened and have reacted with the following:
- “Sure, thanks for letting me know that, I’ll change the position of the buttons in the next round of design.”
- “Could you clarify specifically why you don’t think the current solution isn’t making it easy for users to discover the social channels?”
One is prescriptive, and one is descriptive, you know the drill by now. Scenario two tries to clarify the specific feedback point after listening to the details instead of just quickly hearing and then jumping to the first solution.
Wait for the person giving the feedback to finish.
If you knee-jerk react, and stop them mid-sentence, you might miss the key point they’re trying to describe. They might even communicate it in a different incorrect way when they’ve started up again after your interruption.
Don’t immediately react when you have all the feedback.
Even if the person giving you the feedback has ignored the above recommendations about communicating, it still doesn’t give you the right to respond in the same wrong way. Both people or parties will end up sparring and wasting time in the short and long term if you go down this path.
Confirm what’s being asked of you.
This also helps people give good feedback. You want to be crystal clear on what problem is being communicated, not just saying what the proposed new solution will be as you hear it. This way, when you show the next solution, there will be no hidden surprises.
Try to do all of this face to face, if you can, it’s much quicker. The next step down is a phone call. Emails are difficult to really go back and forth on feedback effectively.
So that’s the practicals out of the way. Are you beginning to like feedback? 🤓
What about the content of feedback? How can we make the whole process effective, efficient, and even, dare I say it, enjoyable? Helping others to give effective feedback is a skill you can make part of your toolkit. Give people easy and obvious pointers about what to do and what not to do with the content of the feedback they’re explaining.
You could even create a feedback guide, relevant with whatever customers you deal with, to help them along the process. “These points will walk you through how to give us really effective feedback on the ‘project deliverable’ we’ve just sent you.”
DO…
- Go negative about things you don’t like. If you don’t tell us what you think isn’t working, we may show you the same thing again and again.
- Go into as much detail as possible as to why you feel something is not working.
- Always remember to think about the goals for the project.
- Tell us why we’re wrong about certain design decisions we’ve made.
- Limit the amount of people participating in the feedback to as little as possible, it will be faster and more efficient.
DON’T…
- Take things personally if we disagree, we’re trying to match your project goals, not please every individual involved, including yourself.
- Mock up designs or create alterations to our designs we show you. Doing so is counter productive because we then have to reverse engineer your design to find out what you were trying to solve. This wastes time.
- Prescribe solutions because prescriptive feedback also needs to be figured out, and reverse engineered to get to the real issue.
- Forget you hired design experts and your job is to be the business expert.
I started by saying feedback is needed to make things the best they possibly can be. This goes as much for execution as it does for building trust between the people involved. Being able to give and receive feedback, without the tantrums or personal vendettas is so often an overlooked step in building a relationship with your colleagues, clients or customers. It really has to be embraced, and be recognised as part of the process, not just a ‘part’ of the process.
As the trust builds, the feedback process gets quicker and more efficient, meaning everyone can properly focus on solving the actual problem. The problem that you used to squabble over in the queue for a flat white, before you embraced feedback. And ditch the politics when giving feedback, we’re trying to make world-class design here.
I want to give a shout out to one of our clients, Charlie HR who put feedback at the centre of everything they do, take a read about how they do it here.
Remember…
“Don’t hire a dog, and then bark yourself.” — David Ogilvy
🐩
