How to View Client Feedback Positively.
It's easy to fall into a habit of finding design revisions or feedback from clients frustrating, obstructive or even annoying. Here's another way of thinking that might just help you out.
We've all been there; revisions are flying in from a client. Maybe they've not provided enough reference work up front. Maybe they've seemed happy the entire project but now we're one week away from their preferred launch day and nothing is good enough. It can be tough. It's important to remember, though, that keeping calm, staying positive and — even more importantly — staying professional is vital.
Client Feedback from my web design point of view.
I've been a freelancer in different disciplines of design for more than 3 years now and one thing that never changes is that you can never get it perfect every single time. Lots of times we may feel super confident and go on to nail that initial exploratory design phase for a client. You know the feeling, it's awesome — and it's key to finishing before the deadline you provided. We all want, or should want, to overdeliver. But this is also a period of the process where we can get bogged down. Clients don't always know if they want a light or dark design. They might not have brand guidelines for you to closely follow, they may not even have colours for you to work with. Some businesses just need a website first and foremost, and it's important you're able to deliver. Even if you need to deliver lots of iterations.
My mindset towards feedback.
Those who know me know someone that has unlimited patience with clients. Those who know me even better know an insanely positive guy who is extremely difficult to weigh down, and I make sure that even the heaviest batches of feedback from my design clients aren't strong enough to overcome that heavy weight.
My ultimate goal is always to satisfy my clients and to make sure at the end of any project, I know (not just think) that they would come back for more. Not letting myself be derailed by feedback is a key part of this. My clients know that if they're not satisfied, they will be eventually because I'll fix whatever it is they need fixing, and these fixes help me.
Receiving 34 comments in our shared Figma file isn't a nightmare for me, it's 34 nudges from the client, to me, in the exact direction we want to go towards when closing out this project. Feedback is a cheat code. If you've ever had to work with someone who is a poor communicator, or doesn't know what they want, you're probably very grateful when you partner up with a solid communicator who founded a business and knows exactly what they need for that business.
These Figma comments are exact steps you can take to get closer to the end of the project, to show you can respond to changes needed, to show you can respond quickly and to show you're resilient. People know when it's a pain in the arse to respond to their feedback. They're not robots. One of those 34 Figma comments will probably say "Sorry, lol" because they know they're harping on about a whole bunch of little changes, but we want perfection. That's what I always tell my clients — and they'd vouch for that, I'm sure. They don't need to be sorry about providing feedback, unless they're asking me to make wholesale changes after signing off on 16 different pages already, but… that's an unlikely scenario. They don't need to be sorry because I want to nail it for them. That's also why I offer unlimited revisions as part of my round-based review process that keeps my clients in the loop all the time. (If you want to hear more about that, let me know on Twitter)
We can all be better.
People deal with pressure & feedback differently, and a giant batch of either of those two things close to a deadline can ruin the good vibes of a project. Try to have that resilience to keep calm, at least while facing the client. We can all rant and rave to ourselves in the office or at the coffee shop, it's healthy to get a little cross sometimes, but try to keep in mind that Feedback from that client of yours is getting you closer to your goal: nailing and completing the project you've been hired to take on.
Thanks so much for reading my first little blog on something I feel quite strongly about and others may want to hear!
Take it easy, and I'll see you soon.
Ryan
P.S. if there's something else you want to hear me write about, let me know. I wanna make this a whole thing.