How to give us really useful feedback.
Your input is important and totally necessary to guide our work. We may not get everything right on the first try. That’s not just okay; it’s part of the process. Our work together can (and probably will) be iterative.
Here’s how you can provide us with effective feedback, so we can really earn the money you’re paying us for your site. The magic happens when your hard-earned skills and expertise come together with ours.
GOOD FEEDBACK
- DO Be honest. If you don’t like something, we need to know - now, not three weeks down the track.
- DO feel free to go negative about things you don’t like. If you don’t tell us what you think isn’t working, we’ll show you the same thing again and again.
- DO point out and go into as much detail as possible as to why you feel something is not working. More than anything, your reasoning is critical to solving the problem.
- DO refer to your initial goals for this site. Relate every piece of criticism back to your goals.
- DO tell us why we’re wrong about certain design and development decisions we’ve made. Part of the process is finding those holes.
- DO limit the amount of people participating in the review cycle to as small as possible – for faster, clearer feedback.
- DO ask why. If you aren’t sure what we were thinking, we’d love to explain the reasoning. Everything we’ve done for the project has a purpose.
- DO relate to your audience. Your audience should be top of mind for every decision or critique that you provide us. What do they need? What will they love?
NOT-SO-GOOD FEEDBACK
- DON'T do our work for us. Please give us written or verbal instructions about what isn’t working; don’t mock up designs or alterations to our designs or code in photoshop, word, or any other program. Doing so is counter productive because we then must reverse engineer the whole thing to find out what problem you were trying to solve. This results in lost time, and budget.
- DON’T prescribe solutions, because prescriptive
feedback also needs to be unpacked, and reverse engineered
to get to the real issue. i.e.
Bad → “Move the Facebook button to the left”
Better → “We want more importance placed on the social media sharing tools.” - DON'T Involve everyone you know in the creative process. We work best when you alone serve as the expert on your company and its audience. Art made by committee is rarely successful.
- DON'T take things personally. If we missed the mark, we need to figure out why and move closer to our mutual target. If we disagree with you, it’s because we’re thinking about your goals and your audience. It’s not personal, it’s business.
- DON'T prescribe fixes. You’re paying us to provide solutions. Explain the problem and we’ll pitch potential fixes to you, based on our research, experience and skills.
- DON’T forget you hired design and development experts
and your job is to be the business expert.