The 5 Golden Rules to Effective Designer-Client Feedback

By Kathleen Burns , Jun 19 2014

Feedback is an important part of the design process, and it’s the part of the project that designers get the most frustrated about because they feel it doesn’t work. Each party has strong opinions and tension will rise, and it becomes hard to keep your cool when someone else understand what you are trying to say.

Bridging the communication gap

The feedback communication breakdown between the client and the designer happens because the talk strays from the design itself to typical topics such as nit-picking the design brief and what did this mean, to rates discussions! I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of articles discussing what to do to fix the relationship between them. What most people come to realize is that this breakdown happens because the client and designers don’t know how to talk to each other in a way that the other can relate to.

Communication and trust are the keys to getting what each party wants and needs, but often we get distracted from our mission to create a great design. I’m sure you gave feedback at some point in your life whether it was for class work, day-to-day discussions, or work assessments, but very few people have ever been educated on how to give proper client feedback.

Naturally, we start by saying what we like, along with things we don’t like as much, and then decide to just fix it ourselves. However the only way to make the feedback effective is to follow the golden rules and use them to guide your conversation, and focus your energy on what truly matters – improving the final design! Infographic- The 5 Golden Rules to Effective Designer-Client Feedback

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Kathleen is a New Jersey blogger with an interest in brand design and a passion for graphic design, illustration, and social media. She loves to deliver inspiration to others to give them the means to achieve their branding and design goals.

 

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