How to Get Great Stakeholder Feedback

The situation

You are running a website design project for your organization, and, while you’re in charge of the project, it’s essential to get input from your leadership team and your board of directors on the wireframes and the design.

Often, people asking for this type of feedback who do not have formal training in design will show the work to the group and ask an open ended question like “what do you think?” But this is a mistake because it opens the doors to The Danger Zone of Subjective Opinions! You will get responses like these:

• I don’t really think that shade of green looks very good
• The logo should be bigger
• Move this specific element to this other part of the page
• Change the shape of that to be more round
• Can we put something in this big empty space?

And so on …

Why you should avoid — at all costs — The Danger Zone of Subjective Opinions

These replies perhaps seem useful at first. Leadership is giving their direct thoughts and feedback about the design, right? But do you notice what’s common to each response? They are all personal opinions. And, they are all providing a solution to a problem that the person noticed, but has not named.

This approach is not effective because a design is (or definitely should be! call us if your designer isn’t doing this …) based on a strategy that aims to get certain outcomes. For example, a wireframe is a tool we use to plan the proper hierarchy and placement of content on a web page to ensure that the content meets what audiences are expecting to find, and makes it easy for them to find important information. And a design (the wireframe fleshed out with colors, and design details, and real content) aims to represent the brand, as well enhance and build upon the goals for the wireframe.

So when you ask open-ended questions that result in personal opinions and design direction, you are not getting the right kind of feedback to make useful changes.

Some folks will run with this and attempt to implement what was asked for.

This is big mistake! It ignores strategy, and sidesteps the expertise of the designer.

Here’s what we teach all our clients to do instead

How to present work to stakeholders to get high quality, effective feedback.

1. For each design, start by explaining the goal(s) of the design. For example: “For this home page design the main goal was to make sure people understand what we do at-a-glance.”
2. Talk about the design solution, and how its various elements achieve that goal. Include the reasoning from the designer for specific choices such as the typography, color balance, shapes used, photograph style, etc. For example: “This home page design has a large statement right up top that says ‘Funding cancer research that saves lives.’ The text is large and contrasts well with the background so it’s noticeable and easy to read.. A second goal was motivating people to stay on the site and learn more. So you can see that down the page we’ve created portals to other content on the site, in a top-to-bottom hierarchy based on what people said they are most likely to look for (based on our survey).”
3. Then, ask the stakeholders questions that ask them to evaluate whether they think the design will result in achievement of the goals. For example, “Given the goal of making sure people understand what we do, is this design going to achieve that goal? Why or why not?” Or, “Given that we want people to visit other content on the site, will this design drive that action? Why or why not?”

PRO-TIP: If a stakeholder is stuck providing personal opinions on what the design solution should be, try this. Ask them, “What is the problem you’re trying to solve?”

Asking about the problem they’re trying to solve usually provides a sense of relief. They realize they don’t have to solve the problem they’ve identified — the designer can do that. They just have to share that they see a problem, and explain what it is.

Why this works:

It removes personal preference reactions to things like typography and color choices in favor of considered, strategic thinking about the effectiveness of the design in reaching specific goals. Thus it eliminates subjective feedback like, “I just don’t like that color of green.”

It frames the conversation professionally, around business outcomes. For example, this response “Those shapes remind me of a circuit board. They don’t align conceptually with our grassroots approach.” is superior to this, “I don’t like they way those squarish shapes look. Can we try something more round?”

Asking “why” provides valuable information to use in correcting anything that is off. For example, “The goal is to evoke a sense of excitement. I think this design does that ok but it could be better.” We ask, “why?” Then, “The colors are mostly dark green and cream which feel soothing. There is that bit of burnt orange that pops, but the overall feel of the total look does not seem exciting.”

If you try this, please let us know how it went.