Refining Ideas and Solutions

Once you have gathered feedback from your client and prospective users, it is time to put this information to use.

You are expected to refine the designs you have made. This raises two possibilities:

• Your feedback identified areas for improvement, in which case it is easy: you can make changes that incorporate one or more of the suggestions
• Your feedback suggested that the original design was perfect and nothing could be improved: this sadly doesn’t imply that the design is perfect. More likely is that the questions you asked of the reviewers were too superficial or limited in scope, and did not allow for suggestions to be made. Alternatively, you may need to ask more people to provide feedback

Once you have some suggestions, it is important to note that you do not have to implement all of them! It is your job as a designer to decide which suggestions have merit, and which are not worth pursuing. Remember that design is in a large part subjective. If you implement every idea from everyone, you will end up with an incoherent mess.

Identify Feedback for Action

The first step of the process is to identify and state which pieces of feedback you are going to implement. Let’s say that two of your reviewers said that the colour scheme made it difficult to read the company’s name in a logo. From this, you might decide to alter the colour scheme: so make it clear that as a result of feedback, which said that the colour scheme was unclear, you are going to make changes.

Repeat this process until you have identified at least two areas where changes to the design can be made.