why most design feedback doesn’t help

most design feedback is about the surface. a colour that feels off. a font that doesn’t quite fit. “have you tried making it bigger?” these things aren’t wrong, exactly. but they’re answers to a question nobody asked.

the question the designer was actually asking — whether they said it out loud or not — is: does this work? does this layout communicate what i want it to communicate? does this structure match how the user is going to move through it? is the claim i’m making true?

feedback about aesthetics doesn’t answer that. it just replaces one guess with another.

i’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of design feedback over the years. the stuff that made me better was never the “i prefer version b” kind. it was the kind that engaged with what i was trying to do. “i don’t think users will scroll this far before they’ve decided whether to trust you.” “you’re asking for a lot of information before you’ve given anything back.” that’s useful because it’s falsifiable. i can check it. i can push back if i disagree. it changes what i do next.

the difference is the level of abstraction. preference feedback lives at the level of the surface — colours, spacing, visual vibes. useful feedback lives at the level of the argument — what does this design assume, and is that assumption right?

the reason most feedback is surface-level isn’t that people don’t care. it’s that engaging with the argument requires knowing what the argument is. which means the designer has to have made one, and made it visible. i wrote about this before — design is an argument you’re making about how people work. if you haven’t surfaced that argument, you can’t get feedback on it. you can only get feedback on the skin.

so part of this is on the designer. show your working. say what you’re claiming, not just what you’ve made.

but even when designers do that, they often get feedback that doesn’t engage with it. this is the part that’s genuinely hard to fix, because most of the people in a design review aren’t trained to critique. they’re stakeholders with taste and opinions. asking them to engage at the level of the argument is asking a lot.

which is why i think the value of good critique — from someone who actually knows what they’re looking at — is easy to underestimate. not because it’s validating, but because it’s diagnostic. it tells you where your argument breaks down. that’s different from “this looks nice” or “not sure about the font.” it’s the thing that moves the work forward.

if your design is ready for that kind of diagnostic feedback, i offer structured design critique — analysis at the level of the argument, not the surface. $75.