Unpacking Design Feedback

Designers depend on feedback from stakeholders to refine and improve their designs. However, it's not always easy to mine valuable insights from their comments. In this post, I'll discuss how designers can draw out more actionable feedback from stakeholders by setting objectives, communicating clearly, and asking clarifying questions.

Before you share the work

Remind yourself why you're seeking stakeholder feedback in the first place

Sharing your work with stakeholders isn't only about getting the green light, although that can be an important pretense for meeting. What's most important is that stakeholders have valuable insights and perspectives that you may not have considered. Their input can make your work stronger.

Familiarize yourself with who the stakeholders are

It's important to know who your stakeholders are when you're preparing to share work. If you know who will be in the room, you can tailor your presentation to what they're interested in, and ask for feedback in their areas of expertise. Knowing your stakeholders also makes it easier to interpret their feedback, because you can more easily contextualize it.

Communicate clearly about your goals and objectives

Before you click "share screen," it can be helpful to establish clear goals and objectives. This way, your stakeholders can provide more focused and relevant feedback. Describe the problem you're trying to solve, and offer guidelines for giving feedback on your work. Communicate which parts of the design that you would like feedback on, and also what you don't want feedback on. Set the boundaries for the conversation so you can refer to them later if you need to guide the feedback.

After you share the work

Once you've shared the work, you'll find that it's like an end of innocence. It's open to criticism, now. When the feedback starts coming in, your goal should be to foster collaboration and open communication around it. Be curious; make it into a conversation. In that conversation, you need to help non-designer stakeholders find the right words to express how they feel about your work.

Ask clarifying questions

It can be hard for people who aren't designers to give clear feedback on a design. It helps everyone in the room if you do some digging and ask clarifying questions to uncover the true meaning of the feedback.

The general theme of your clarifying questions should be, "Tell me more." You want to encourage stakeholders to be specific about what they like and don't like, and help them find words to describe the feelings that your design work triggered in them. For example, the initial feedback could be as vague as, "I don't like this." When you ask them to tell you more, the feedback might evolve to, "The colors are bothering me." Then you might ask, "Which colors are bothering you and why?"

Re-orient to user goals and business objectives

You should try and get your stakeholders to focus on objective ideas rather than personal opinions. You can do this by asking them to consider the work from another perspective. Remember when you took the time to outline your goals and objectives before sharing the work? Those objectives can help you ground the feedback after you share your work. Ask the stakeholders to suggest how the design might be better suited to the needs of your target audience, or to the goals of the project. To answer they will have to separate their personal feelings from the broader purpose of the work.

In conclusion

Sharing work for stakeholder feedback is a central part of your job as a designer. It's necessary to secure buy-in for your ideas, and arrive at design solutions that meet user needs and business objectives. But handling feedback in expert fashion also serves a larger purpose. The way you interact with stakeholders impacts more than the work you brought to that meeting; it can change how designers and their work are perceived in your company at large. When you engage in a collaborative feedback conversation with stakeholders, it's an opportunity to teach everyone in the room about what designers do, and make our profession seem less opaque to those who have a hard time understanding what we bring to the table.