How designers should ask for (and receive) high-quality feedback – Smashing Magazine

It is quite common to see designers complain about the poor quality feedback they have received from stakeholders or clients. “They literally told me to make the logo bigger!” they might be joking, or, “They told me ‘it just doesn’t feel right’ but couldn’t explain why. What am I supposed to do about it?” Our response is usually to empathize with our poor colleague – after all, we’ve all been there before – and laugh at the stupidity of customers.

This kind of interaction can be a great bonding moment with a fellow designer. Still, as an industry that is meant to be good empathy with people we might be missing something here, especially if we find that we get this kind of feedback quite often. Maybe it’s not all the stupid coworker’s or client’s fault. Maybe that has something to do with it too how we present our work, the questions we ask and when we choose to ask them.

What’s going wrong

I’ve been through more bad design presentations than I care to think about, with designers walking through every design decision they ever made.

“First I tried it. Then I tried it. I didn’t like how it worked, so I...