Tips

Please invest in your Designer

Zetsy will source an amazing Designer with the skills you need to unlock growth for you and your team. We work well with clients who offer company specific training and feedback, engage at least weekly, and build a strong relationship with their Designer. Like any new team member, there will be a period of learning in the beginning, but with the right amount of investment, they will unlock massive growth for you and your company.

Start small with easier tasks, clearly recorded instructions, and then increase task complexity over time.

It’s important to start your Designer with straightforward tasks and clear instructions to get rote work off your plate. In the beginning, avoid things requiring too much discretion. As you build your working relationship, the Designer role may evolve to tasks requiring more judgement. The Zetsy folder structure and chat window are your tools to organize tasks and information between you and your Designer.

Clarity brings Confidence

The number one product that you ship before you ship your real product is clarity. At the start of any exploration or product development, we will take time to create a sound requirements document, if you don’t already have one. Additional documents such as a feature prioritization framework may be suggested.

How to give feedback and ask for design revisions

A comprehensive guide for clients to provide frustration-free feedback and create better design outcomes.

The goal of every design team is building strong, healthy, positive client relationships, and while most relationships begin that way, with both parties excited to get started, studies have shown that most client relationships that devolve, happen during  design revisions, leaving the client frustrated and the designer resentful.

Frame your feedback with context

The most important thing about design feedback is that it must always remain framed by your project goals and strategy for success. When you give feedback to your Designer, make sure it’s aligned with these goals. These goals should be captured in the Product Requirements Document, with support from the Feature Prioritization Matrix. If these are not completed, please take time to do so first

If it’s not relevant to the purpose of the project, it probably falls into the category of personal aesthetic preference, which isn’t all that useful. *See  stay objective  below.

Be clear and specific

Vague feedback is not helpful. “I’m not feeling it”, or “It doesn’t move me” are ineffective statements.

Be specific – Make sure you frame your feedback and describe precisely what it applies to (is it usability, form and style, functional details). Tools like Loom help a lot here, allowing you to record very contextual feedback directly on your screen
Clarity - Speak your mind but stay concise. Use terms that are specific, not ambiguous. Keep everything connected back to your context. For example, ”I worry it won’t engage our core audience (and proceed to define that audience)” is far more useful than “make it pop”.

Explain your thinking

The design feedback process is a discussion. As co-creators, engineers and developers, part of our job is to question everything which is subjective. So, if your feedback is a vague “I don’t like this”, we’ll probably ask “why not?”. Or we may say, “but how will your target market react to it?”. Please be prepared to answer that why every single time. If you don’t have an answer that ties back to your project goals and product requirements, then you might question whether that piece of feedback has any purpose at all. 

For a hassle-free workflow, provide the why right from the beginning, so we don’t have to ask.

Be coherent

- Start by explaining the aspects you like about the design. For example: “Nice colour choice on the elements, it really draws attention to the main feature”.

- Move on to any elements that you have concerns about. For example: “However I’m concerned there are too many visible shut lines in the front, or buttons that could overwhelm customers. Can you please change this to a single key?”.

Lastly, follow up to end on a positive note. For example: “I like the way you’ve visualised the core product function, it is simple and compelling. Let’s get that same level of simplicity in the visual details too”.

If you don’t have much positive to say, at the very least, always stay kind and respectful. It may take a few rounds of feedback for you and your designer to get in the same headspace. After all, we all have the same goal here.

Stay objective

Our personal preferences are so innate to our decision-making process, yet they have very little weight unless the product/service you’re designing is made for you as the sole user.
When providing feedback to your designer, it’s vital that you remove from the equation as much of your own aesthetic preferences as possible. Instead, focus on what your customers need, and will like. What makes them feel they can trust your company.

Comments such as: “I don’t like this” don’t bring any real value to the process. Instead, think in terms of “our users may find it difficult to use because of their age”. Stay objective and always aligned with your project goals.

Tips and Tricks 

Finally, keep feedback about the work, not about the designer.
Refrain from using any personal pronouns to describe the design. Use, for example:

The form looks unbalanced due to the pitch distance between castors”,
Rather than:

“You  messed up the design / You are not smart enough”. 

Even the best of us don’t always get things right the first time around. Revisions are an important part of the design process, and it often forces us out of our comfort zones to discover better design solutions.

Zetsy was established in 2012 and is the largest provider of unlimited product development services in the known universe