When redesigning any website it is inevitable that you, the client, will be involved with the process and ultimately you will be expected to provide feedback on design concepts. A skilled designer will carefully explain the design concepts, and the reasons behind the design decisions, to provide you with an explanation as to how they arrived at the proposed solution. However, this may not always be clear and simple and clients sometimes find that they are left in the dark – feeding back on designs without a clear understanding of ‘how’ to provide feedback and what will be considered ‘constructive’ to the designer and the design process.

So, when faced with a design for your new website how should you provide feedback to your designer to ensure that you, your business and the design team get the most out of the project? Obviously the type of feedback that is useful to the designer to create a successful project and avoid costly overruns on design budgets, but what is this? Your designer should be able to guide you through the process to ensure that they get the right feedback from you.

This is where you need to consider the most efficient and effective use of your budget and think, for instance, whether it really benefits your budget and the business to spend a fifth of the budget deciding which colour to use for a call to action box, or whether there is too much white space around an image… the list goes on. The important thing during any website redesign is that you remain focused on your business, your goals and aspirations; part of the designer’s role is to understand your business and your target audience and represent this in the design.

To help you with this process and help you understand how to provide feedback that will have the maximum impact on your website we have provided a few ideas for you to consider below:

1. Start by distancing yourself from the website. Pretend that it’s not your website and remove your initial expectations and look at it with an objective eye – things rarely turn out as we expect – as it’s hard to envisage everything at the start of a project. You are not looking at the website concepts in order to see if ‘you’ like it, the website is not for you – it’s for your audience and they need to like using and interacting with the site. Try to put yourself in the mind of the intended user.

2. It shouldn’t matter whether or not you like the colour green, if green communicates the right message conceptually (this is where your designer comes in) and connects emotionally with your audience then this will benefit, and have a positive impact on, the user experience. Remember you haven’t got to live in the website, you are not picking out wallpaper – this is a business tool.

3. Put yourself in the shoes of a typical user or target audience member. Does the website concept appeal to them? does it connect emotionally? does it provide the information and user journey that they require?

4. Is the concept successful in communicating your business offering? Does it reflect your USPs? Does it represent the right image and give the user a ‘feeling’ for your company, how you work, and what you offer?

5. Does it successfully differentiate you from your competitors?

6. Content. Has the content (that you provided before the design process started), been used in the best way to sell your business and communicate your business offering?

7. Don’t get hung up on photos. Remember this is a concept, the photos are mostly for display and your images will be added later, unless of course you have provided great images and the designer hasn’t used stock (shame on them!)

8. Copy. Latin is mostly used in concepts. Your copy will be added later unless, of course, you provide it first!

9. Goals. Are the user/business goals easy to achieve? Are the calls to action correct and easy to spot? Does the user journey flow well?

Collaboration

As the client, you are the expert in your business. You know your audience. Your job is to supply the goals, user information, and content. The designer is the design expert. They know—from experience and knowledge—what works and why. It is the designer’s job to design, to take the business goals, USPs, target audience, content, etc., and create a design that works for the user and the business.

The relationship between the client and designer should be a joint effort to create something visually engaging that reaches the target audience and meets the business objective. It is an important collaborative effort, not an us vs. them scenario.