At some point in every project, we send something over and ask, “what do you think?” It’s one of the most important moments in the whole job, and most people feel a little unqualified for it. They’re not designers. They worry their feedback will sound vague, or wrong, or like they’re stepping on toes.
Here’s the good news: you don’t need design words to give great feedback. Some of the most useful notes we’ve ever gotten came from people who’d never opened a design tool in their life. What they did was describe what they were reacting to, honestly and specifically. That’s the whole skill. Here’s how to do it well.
Say what’s wrong, not what to change
The most natural instinct is to jump straight to a fix: “make the logo bigger,” “can this be blue,” “move that to the top.” The trouble is that a fix is your guess at solving a problem we can’t see. And often it’s not the best fix, because you’re not the one who’s been staring at the whole system for two weeks.
So tell us the problem instead of the solution. Not “make the heading bigger” but “I scanned the page and didn’t notice the heading.” Not “make it blue” but “this feels colder than our brand.” When you describe what you’re reacting to, you let us solve it properly - and the proper solution is sometimes nothing like the fix you’d have asked for. “Make the logo bigger” might really mean “I’m worried people won’t know whose site this is,” and there are ten better answers to that than a bigger logo.
Judge it against the job, not your taste
It’s tempting to review a design the way you’d review a painting - do I like it? More useful is to ask whether it does the job. Would a customer landing here understand what we do? Would they know what to click? Does this page make the case we need it to make?
Your taste still matters, and you should say when something feels off. But “I don’t love this shade of green” and “I don’t think a customer would trust this page” are different weights of note, and it helps us to know which one you’re giving. The first is a preference we can usually accommodate. The second is a problem we need to fix whether or not anyone’s taste is involved.
“I don’t like it” is fine - finish the sentence
You’re allowed to not like something. Don’t swallow it to be polite, because a reluctant yes now turns into a rebuild later. But “I don’t like it” on its own leaves us guessing, and our guess might be wrong - we’ll change the wrong thing and you’ll still not like it.
So finish the sentence. “I don’t like it, it feels too corporate for us.” “I don’t like it, it reminds me of our competitor.” “I don’t like it, and I honestly can’t say why.” Even that last one is useful - it tells us to step back rather than tweak, and we can show you a couple of genuinely different directions instead of nudging the one you’re already cool on.
Round it up and send it once
When notes trickle in one message at a time over three days, two things go wrong. We start acting on the first ones before the later ones arrive, sometimes redoing work twice. And nobody can see whether the notes contradict each other, which they sometimes do.
A single pass is far better. Sit with the work for a day, collect everything in one place, and send it together. It doesn’t need to be formal - a list in an email is perfect. Seeing it all at once lets us spot the real theme behind the notes, sort out anything that pulls in opposite directions, and make one confident set of changes instead of a dozen nervous ones.
When you and we disagree
Sometimes we’ll push back on a note. That’s not us being precious - it’s usually because we can see a knock-on effect you can’t, like a change that would work on this page but break the pattern on six others. When that happens, we’ll explain the trade-off and let you make the call. It’s your site and your business.
And it runs the other way too. You know your customers, your industry, and the dozen things you’ve learned the hard way that we haven’t. When you tell us something won’t fly with your audience, we listen, even when the design instinct says otherwise. The best work comes out of that back-and-forth, not from either side just deferring to the other.
None of this is complicated, and none of it requires knowing a single design term. Describe what you see, tell us the problem, be honest, and send it in one go. Do that and you’ll get a website that’s genuinely yours - because you’ll have actually shaped it, instead of nodding along. If you want to see how the rest of a project runs, here’s how we work.
