How to deal with terrible feedback
We are all consumers of design. We all have feelings about what we like or don't like. Those feelings are valid and informed by a lifetime of product experiences. Unfortunately, as a designer, hearing "your design is bad" doesn't give you enough information to fix it: Non-design stakeholders may not have the knowledge to give you anything better.
People react differently to lacking knowledge. Some people remain humble, curious, and collaborative. Others feel threatened and compelled to assert control. When the passenger of a car grabs the steering wheel, bad things happen.
Vague feedback generates repeated attempts on your part to meet the mark, none of which succeed... because there is no mark. Your credibility and spiritual fortitude are depleted bit by bit.
How can we avoid this race to nowhere?
Teach people how to give better feedback
Most of our stakeholders are not designers. They do not understand all the levers you might pull to improve the quality of a design. While they'll certainly have their favorite designs, they usually won't have a large base of high quality, relevant references in mind to judge a design against. However, they are making their best attempt at giving you feedback because they want to ship a better product.
As the designer, it's to your benefit to help them give you better feedback. As a starting point, it's useful to align on the goals of your design: What problem are you trying to solve with this feature? For whom? What emotional tenor are you trying to strike with your aesthetic?
Without clarity of purpose you will get vague, terrible feedback.
First ask stakeholders for purely functional feedback. Does this design achieve it's goals in a usable way?
Ask for more subjective feedback only after you receive core, functional input. Does our aesthetic match the brand as a whole? Does it strike the appropriate emotional tone and tenor based on the user and the context?
Doing this will help stakeholders see what is working about the design, get grounded in the goals of the feature, and provide subjective feedback through a more informed lens. They'll have a real scenario and customer in mind - a real subject - when they judge the subjective aspect of your design.
Non-designers will typically give higher quality functional than aesthetic feedback, so splitting input into these two categories will help you isolate their most crucial and high quality comments. On top of that, you'll set the stage for them to give you better subjective feedback.
If they're still being vague, dig into their feedback. Ask why until you're satisfied that you understand what's going on. Ask for both positive and negative examples of products they think are doing a good job of solving the problem you're working on. If they push you to emulate a rival's poorly designed product, ask them what they like about that product and direct them to better examples of those qualities.
For example, if they venerate a machine parts catalogue from 1992 as the ideal user experience because it uses tables to great effect, gather examples of tabular interfaces from Airtable, Notion, and Linear. Ask them which of those they like best and why.
Once you get all this high quality input, you'll be empowered to act on it because you read my article from last week about obtaining clarity on decision rights.
You'll ship a great product. Everyone will be happy. End of story, right?
Wrong.
People want to be heard
People don't just give feedback to improve the product. They also give feedback because they want to be heard, they want to feel like they're part of the process, and they want to make their mark on the company.
Rather than wring our hands about how irrational that is, we should accept and work with these natural tendencies. We want to make our mark on our products as well, after all. Being realistic about these tendencies means we'll have a much easier time getting the right things built without pain and conflict. But how do we do that in practice?
We'll talk more about that in the next post. We'll start with a gripping tale about Leonardo Da Vinci, a rich aristocrat, and the perfect nose.