6 Reasons You Should Be Collecting Design Feedback

Designing a new website is no easy task. It can take weeks or even months to complete, depending on the size. Naturally, a client’s site can start to feel like your pet project — and web design feedback can start to feel personal.

But no matter how hard feedback can be to hear, it’s a critical part of the design process. At the end of the day, your mission is to create an end product your clients will love. Getting client feedback throughout the web design process unlocks a new perspective that helps you do just that (and much more).

Here are six reasons why you need to collect feedback from clients long before your website launch date.

1. Web Design Feedback Makes You More Efficient

Getting feedback for website designs can feel like a hassle. When you’re in the middle of your design flow, the last thing you want to do is stop just to make a small tweak. But a little backtracking along the way is far better than a major reworking after your design is complete.

Stopping to collect and incorporate feedback may feel inefficient, but creating a design your client is unhappy with can add days or weeks of extra work.

Imagine your client wants a website animation only on the homepage of their site. Without consistent web design feedback, you might have created a unique animation for every page because it fit your vision of a great user experience. By the time you finalize your design, you may have wasted a significant amount of time on design elements that you need to remove.

When you’re aware of exactly what your client wants every step of the way, you can let their feedback guide you in the right direction. You won’t be at risk of taking a completely different path, which may not even lead to the right destination. Instead, you’ll make the best use of your design time.

2. Incorporating Design Feedback Improves Clients Satisfaction

Getting feedback for website designs doesn’t just help you stay on the right track. It can also make your end product more personalized for your clients’ needs. With their input, you can cater to their exact needs, which is ideal for client satisfaction.

Clients also appreciate it when their feedback is valued. While it’s true that clients don’t always offer the best feedback — they hired you for your expertise, after all — treating their input as valid can help you build better client relationships.

A happy client is more than proof of a great design. When customers are satisfied, they’re 83% more likely to provide referrals (and will if you ask). They’re also more likely to become loyal, returning customers who are easier to sell to and spend 300% more. The more your clients love the quality of your work, the better your business results can be.

3. A Fresh Perspective Can Uncover Key Issues

When you’ve been working on a website for hours each day, it can be easy to miss issues that are obvious to others. Your clients can help you spot areas with inconsistent visual branding, confusing design elements, and more.

Getting visual feedback on web designs can help you fix your newfound issues fast, too. When your client provides screenshots of what they’re seeing or referring to, you can efficiently act on the key issues they find.

When clients aren’t informing you of problems that need to be fixed, they can also help you identify new opportunities by pitching ideas and suggestions.

4. Web Design Feedback Eliminates Biases

Your expertise can be your worst enemy. What’s intuitive to you may not be for the typical website visitor — and there’s no one who knows your website’s end user better than your client. Your client is the best person to help you see your website through their customers’ eyes.

Anytime you ask for more perspectives, you also make your website a touch more accessible. It’s not uncommon for professionals to forget to design for disabilities like color blindness or even epilepsy. Client feedback can broaden your perspective, so you create the best end product possible.

It’s also easy for any professional to be biased toward their own work, which often incorporates their own personal style. Web design feedback forces you to confront those biases and continuously think in the perspective of the client and the end user.

5. Getting Feedback for Website Design Helps You Improve Your Skills

Feedback in any field can help you improve the quality of your services, long after an individual project is complete. As you gather more client design feedback, you can start to spot trends in their responses, which can become your top areas to improve.

But being a great website designer isn’t just about offering excellent end products. It also requires you to be skilled at communicating and collaborating with clients. In the process of collecting feedback, you’re building your understanding of how clients think and how you can best explain your design choices to them.

In this sense, ongoing web design feedback helps you become an excellent communicator that clients love to work with.

6. A Great Feedback Loop Sets Expectations

Clients aren’t always aware of the exact direction they want to take upon your first consultations. Even if your final design is exactly what they asked for, your client may realize it’s not exactly what they want.

Touching base with clients throughout the design process gives clients the chance to add new expectations — or revise previous ones — as you go.

A great feedback loop can make your clients better clients, too. Each time they make suggestions or ask questions, you can give them insight into your thought process and educate them about design practices. By the end of the design process, they’ll provide more productive feedback.

Create Better Results With Feedback for Website Design

When you want to achieve high customer satisfaction and boost your efficiency, getting web design feedback from your clients is a must. Clients can guide your design work in the right direction, so you’re never left with major revision requests in the end. Plus, getting a fresh perspective is always a great opportunity to make your designs more accessible, personalized, and reliable.