Do you need to give feedback to your web designer? Here’s our guide to ensuring your design team is getting what they need.
It’s easy to look at something and say whether you like it or don’t like it. We’ve been trained to do it our entire lives. Whether it’s choosing an outfit to wear, a team to pull for, or a new piece of art to hang in your living room.
What’s not so natural for us is giving informative and helpful responses about a design to a team of professionals. Personal preference is highly subjective. However, design as professionals approach it is intentional: it is meant to achieve a specific goal. Therefore managing feedback is a crucial part of the design process.
Over the years we’ve found that the following guidelines will take your feedback to the next level and ensure your design team is getting useful, actionable information. Try them out on your next project, and see how they help the right results come more quickly to you and your team.
Tips for Giving Feedback to Your Web Designer
Follow our 5 tips for ensuring that you give helpful feedback!
1. The design is intended to represent your company, not your individual preferences.
One of the most important things to remember is to try to keep personal preference out of design feedback and decisions. The site design should is supposed to represent the brand and personality of your company, not an individual working for that company. So perhaps someone on your team says, “I hate that color.” Keep in mind that, even so, it could be perfect for your company’s message.
2. Give as much detail as possible.
In some cases too much detail isn’t a good thing… like when you give your entire past relationship history on the first date. Bad idea. But when giving feedback on proposed designs, you want to give as much detail as possible. Telling your agency you “don’t like” something isn’t useful. Especially if you don’t explain why you don’t like it, or what you would like to be different about it.
3. Offer alternative suggestions.
So you’ve told your web designer that you would like to see a certain element changed, and you want them to change it…. They’re the designer, right? They should know what to do.
Well, yes and no. When giving feedback to your web designer and want them to include something you love, it is most helpful to give them some direction as to what you’re imagining. This is where sending them links to other sites or things that you like can come in handy.
4. Remember what stage of the project you’re in.
It’s easy to jump ahead when you’re excited about a new website for your company. Sometimes it can be difficult not to envision every step of the process as some sort of layout of your new site. Pay attention to how your designer describes each step of the process. Style Tiles, for example, may require completely different feedback than wireframes or actual layouts. It will all come together in the end.
5. Have fun!
We understand it can sometimes be a stressful process when you’re paying for a new website. You want to make sure everything’s perfect, and maybe you’re even getting pressure from your supervisor about the project. But the more fun you make it, the more successful it will be. Let your personality show, engage in the process, enjoy the collaboration, and then sit back and enjoy the final result.
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