MrMario
Manager
 | Here are four tips that I found on a website that will give you good feedback. | 1. Ask Your Mom I’m serious. Better yet, ask your grandma. Heck, even your plumber would be great! The reason I say this is because you must have people review your website who aren’t part of the web design and development community. Too often, web designers design for their industry colleagues and not for the audiences that their clients are trying to reach. If you really want quality feedback, go a step further. For every project, try to get feedback from actual members of the audience you are trying to reach. If you are building a website for engineers, talk to engineers. If you are designing for a school, talk to teachers and students. Admittedly, getting actionable feedback from outside the web design community can be hard (see “How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell“), but at the very least, these groups might alert you to mistakes you’ve made from misunderstanding the target audience. A lot is to be said for thinking on your own about an audience’s online habits and aesthetic preferences. But as fruitful as that can be, do it only after you’ve stepped out of your ivory tower and mingled with the Internet’s common folk. 2. Ask a Big Name Here’s a question: if you could get feedback from anyone in the world, who would it be? Every person would choose someone different, but I’ll bet almost everyone could whip up a shortlist of people who they would love to bounce a few questions off of. Here’s the more important question: what’s stopping you from asking them? Sure, they may be busy and important, but that doesn’t mean trying to reach them isn’t worth a shot. I don’t meant to brag, but I’ve been able to get just about everyone I’ve approached to reply to an email or talk by phone for five minutes to discuss a few questions. Sure, it took some digging and out-of-the-box thinking on my part (as well as being extra nice to their personal assistants or secretaries!), but it was well worth it. You would be surprised how accessible such people can be if you show genuine (but not creepy) interest and respect for their time. Tim Ferris has an excellent section in his book The Four-Hour Work Week and in a post on his blog about reaching out to big names to discuss ideas and ask questions. In the section of his book entitled “Find Yoda,” Ferris gives a few tips for getting big name mentors on the phone (the one he mentions from his own experience is author John Grisham). Not everyone can do this, but that’s the point: only the most innovative, persistent and courageous will follow through on getting feedback from their heroes, and that is ultimately what sets them apart from the crowd. 3. Ask Yourself Here’s a seemingly obvious one. You are surely already editing your own work and making adjustments as needed. But are you really stepping back and asking yourself deep critical questions about your work (questions that would likely lead to revisions), or are you coasting on what you think looks good at the moment? Every designer and developer would do well, upon completing a project, to wait before submitting it to the client. Get as far away from it as you can for a day or two, and then come back to it with fresh eyes. Waiting until that heat of the moment has passed will uncover problems that you missed earlier or perhaps give you new confidence in elements you weren’t sure about before. Either way, taking a step back and asking yourself critical questions will give you a more thoughtful, deliberate piece of work. 4. Ask Your Community Whether you work alone or with a team of designers and developers, you need feedback from people who are like you and who do the same kind of work you do. The feedback you get from fellow members of the community is the most actionable because they know the vocabulary and can give you hard, practical advice (instead of the dreaded verdict one gets from clients, “It needs a bit more pizzazz!”). Your community also understands the various factors that affect your work, like budgets, deadlines and stressful clients. If you are a freelancer or work alone, getting feedback from the wider community can be frustrating, because you don’t have a dedicated team of colleagues who can review what you’re doing. You’re not alone in this (think of the thousands of other freelancers out there), but there are a few ways to work the situation to your advantage. One way is to trade feedback. Find a web designer or developer whom you respect, and offer to review their next project in exchange for their feedback on yours (you might not even know them personally—but don’t let that stop you!). Figuring out a system for giving and receiving feedback might take a while, but such a relationship has the potential to become beneficial and second-nature for both of you. Tools for Collecting Feedback Most websites, with their forums and comment sections, aren’t ideal places to collect and aggregate feedback. Here instead are a few innovative tools that provide great ways to share and receive feedback on projects and designs.  Concept Feedback is a growing community of design, development and marketing professionals and a welcome change to disorganized forum walls. Concept Feedback allows others to provide quick, actionable feedback on your website via a comprehensive rating system, with the requirement that everyone first give quality feedback before receiving feedback from others. Oh, did I mention that it’s free? This was found Here and I take no full credit of this post. |
Tue Apr 06, 2010 8:17 pm by Guest
