If you’re finding it difficult to provide feedback on presentations, don’t worry – you aren’t alone ❤️

Giving feedback on creative concepts can be hard sometimes! As designers, we’ve have a lot of practice with thinking strategically about design concepts and talking about what works vs. what doesn’t and why. But as a non-designer, having these types of conversations might feel new to you and that’s ok. Below are some tips and tricks that will hopefully make the feedback process feel easier for you.

And if you still find yourself struggling to explain your feedback, remember that you always have the option to schedule a review call with us so we can talk through presentations together. For some clients, review calls end up being easier and more productive, so that’s why we always offer them as an option.

Tip No. 01 – Be specific as possible.

When talking about design or creative concepts, vague answers like “It’s not working” or “I just don’t like it” aren’t very helpful for our team because it doesn’t help us understand what specific elements of the concept need to be refined. So when giving your feedback, it’s important to be specific and explain WHY something feels good or bad to you! This can sometimes be hard to put your finger on or explain in words, but try your best.

Tip No. 02 – Use the Goldilocks exercise when you know that something needs to change, but you aren’t sure what that change should be.

We see this problem come up often with clients! They like a concept and it feels 80% of the way there, but there’s something missing and they don’t know what it is. In these situations, we like to do the Goldilocks exercise! (Yes, like the kid’s story of Goldilocks and 3 bears)

In that story, Goldilocks tries different bowls of porridge. Some are too hot, some are too cold. But Goldilocks wants to find the one that’s just right.

So imagine if there was a spectrum that Goldilocks could use to rank a bowl of porridge. One end of the spectrum is for the “Too Hot” bowls and the other end is for the “Too Cold” bowls.

We want to use a similar idea to figure out what isn’t working with the current design concept and what direction it needs to move on the spectrum to feel “just right”.

You’ll choose different adjectives for the opposite ends of the spectrum, likely ones that relates to how you want your brand to be perceived vs. how you don’t want to be perceived. Then you’ll figure out where your feel our current concept is on that spectrum and where you want it to be instead so that it will feel “just right”. Below are a few examples: