How to Deliver Creative Feedback
Yet another way to establish trust and respect between you and your team is by mastering the art of creative feedback. If you can learn to deliver creative feedback effectively, you build stronger relationships with the members of your team by allowing them to maintain ownership of their work. You’ll also keep them focused on meeting objective, customer-centered goals rather than trying to satisfy someone’s subjective needs. Effective delivery of creative feedback also helps keep your team more engaged and motivated in their jobs, whereas poor delivery can be extremely frustrating and demotivating for creatives.
Two keys to delivering creative feedback effectively are knowing how to deliver it and when to deliver it.
Have the team present the work. Before delivering feedback, it’s important to set the proper stage for delivery. Whenever possible, I recommend asking your team to present the work to you rather than emailing you a document to review. Through the presentation process, the person presenting will inevitably share details about why the team made certain decisions during the creative process. Knowing this information will change your perceptions of the work and allow you to give more pointed feedback. For the same reasons, I think it’s important to present the work to the client as well, whether you do it or someone from your team does it. Simply emailing a document to a client for review can set you up for a painful few days.
Be objective. When providing creative direction, one of your primary goals is to eliminate as much subjectivity from the process as possible. If you’re effective there, the payoff is huge. Provide feedback based only on objective criteria. Does the design meet the intent? Is everything consistent with brand standards? Is the text readable? Will the end user be able to accomplish her goals? Does the copy speak from the brand voice? I don’t like it is not valid feedback.
Speak to positives first. It’s easy to go straight to the details that need work when you’re reviewing a project and providing feedback. However, remember that we all put ourselves into our work and are generally very proud of the work we do. Feedback is never personal, but it sure is nice to hear about what we did well. Your team members will generally listen to the constructive feedback more effectively when they just heard a list of everything they did well.
Be constructive. This can be the most challenging aspect of giving feedback. It helps to make it perfectly clear that you’re providing feedback on the work, not the person. It also helps to be positive first as mentioned above. Most importantly, though, give specific reasons for each bit of constructive feedback, and tie each reason back to one of the objective criteria outlined when providing the initial creative direction on the project. This really helps drive home the fact that your feedback is not personal and it’s not based on opinion; it’s just for the benefit of the final product and the end user / customer.
Be sincere and thankful. It’s important to be sincere in your communications with your team. They’re not dummies, and they’ll see through your attempts to just be positive for the sake of being positive. Make sure they know how much you appreciate all their hard work. As often as possible, say thank you. Trust me; they’ll never tire of it.
Build project checkpoints into the creative process. This is a time for you as well as the client(s) to let the team know if they’re on track. It’s much easier to make adjustments early in the project than to wait until all the details are ironed out and polished. On the other hand, it’s extremely painful for the creative team and the client when you discover a project didn’t meet expectations or intent at the very end.
Review with your team first. Build in time for you to review and the team to make necessary adjustments before looping in the client. You’ll be able to predict client feedback and either make necessary adjustments or at least prepare the team to answer client questions.
Whether you communicate directly with your clients or an account manager does, I recommend someone share these principles of delivering feedback with the client. If you can train your clients over time to deliver feedback based on objective criteria, you’ll have a much healthier and productive relationship that leads to more efficient and higher quality output.
And speaking of objective criteria, I have some tips on how to establish that criteria when providing creative direction in the earliest stages of a project. Give them a read and share your thoughts.
Also published on GIANT UX.
