Why early feedback is so important
Getting feedback early and often saves you time in the long run
Getting feedback early may feel unintuitive. Most of the time we focus on perfecting our work before showing it to the world. As who wants to show something half finished. But here’s the thing, showing your work early in the design process can help you save time later on. It can seem a waste getting feedback on your ideas if they aren’t fully fleshed out or the visual design isn’t quite right yet, but I promise it’s not.
By only showing your work after you’ve slaved away for hours perfecting pixels and choosing the right colours isn’t a sure fire way of preventing negative feedback. You’re still probably going to hear from your team or client that actually they don’t like the colour blue or that the interaction pattern feels wrong.
I’ve been there, protecting my work for too long until I’ve felt that it is ready for the world to see, only to have feedback that has meant my work needs to go in a new direction because it’s not fully hit the brief or there’s actually a better solution that I hadn’t thought of.
Introducing others to your ideas and work early for feedback allows you to get a pool of ideas and perspectives that you can use to your advantage. Making use of others’ great ideas as a springboard to enhance your ideas even further is a great way to craft innovative concepts and designs.
Get comfortable with feedback to save your sanity
You’ll always be getting feedback. If you’re working in a design team or for clients, they’re going to have opinions. So you might as well rip the band aid off early and hear their thoughts, feelings and criticisms because you’ve poured your heart and soul too deeply into the work.
When we spend a lot of time on a project it’s really easy to get too attached to ideas or the design, which makes it so much harder to respond positively to negative feedback as we’re already sold on our design solution.
However, by getting feedback early you’re no longer spending hours of time on a route or design that may need to be changed dramatically anyway. But most importantly showing rough work that you’re not too emotionally or spiritually attached to means you’ll be more open to feedback, trying new things and should fast track you to the best design solution.
Becoming aware as a designer of when to show work to others and when to spend a bit more time crafting, is a skill that can take a number of years and you won’t always get it right. One aspect I’ve learnt from good designers is that they know not to spend all their creative energy and time on only one idea before showing their work to others for feedback. Good designers anticipate changes so by showing work early they protect their time, energy and creativity that can be used once they are on the home stretch of a project.
Positive or negative — Feedback will improve the quality of your work
Regardless of whether feedback is positive or negative, hearing others thoughts and perspectives will no doubt improve your work. Even if you don’t agree with the feedback you hear, purely being challenged on your ideas forces you to reflect and firm up your decisions and opinions on what you’ve created.
Being open to feedback allows you to stress test your work before it goes to the real world. If those closest to you are struggling to understand your user flow you’ve designed or how the logo relates to the brand then it could be possible that the target audience will struggle with this too.
When seeking feedback it’s also important to get a balance of the positive and negative. The phrase, ‘don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater’ is important here. If we only ever hear or seek negative feedback it’s easy for us to change parts of our work that were working well in the attempt to fix what isn’t.
Feedback in teams is a positive sign of safety
Teams who are proactive in sharing and asking for feedback are teams that have a high level of psychological safety. When people aren’t comfortable to challenge what is, or they don’t feel safe to speak up or suggest new ideas, it means that team dynamics have big underlying problems.
Working in a team where you feel safe to try things and hear what others have to say, will help you become a better designer, as it’s rare that we create good work if we’re not having the best time.
If you don’t want to ask for feedback from those who you’re working with, it’s a good idea to ask yourself why that might be. Is it because you’re worried about criticism, perhaps you’ve had a negative experience before. Or maybe you don’t value the feedback from the people you’re working with. Either way getting to the root of why you’re not keen on getting feedback from the people around you is important.
In conclusion, seeking feedback early and often can save you time and improve the quality of your work. By being open to feedback and taking the time to reflect on it, you can create better designs and become a better designer overall. So don’t be afraid to show your work and ask for feedback. It can only make your work better in the long run.
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