At first, it’s exciting—you’re sharing your ideas, people are chiming in, everyone’s involved. But then one person says, “What if we try Comic Sans ironically?” and another’s like, “Can we just… add everything back in?” and suddenly the whole thing’s off the rails and no one remembers what the original point was.
Welcome to design feedback in the real world.
As a designer, you want to be open. You want collaboration. But if you take in every comment without context, you’re not refining a design—you’re crowd-sourcing chaos. Early in my career, I thought the goal was to make everyone happy. If someone wanted a pop-up, I added it. If someone wanted more text, I squeezed it in. The result? Frankenstein designs that served no one—not the user, not the brand, and definitely not my portfolio.
One project still sticks with me. I was working with a client who kept pushing to add huge chunks of text to the homepage. “We need to tell the full story,” they said. I get it. Passion. Vision. Love it. But I had to gently remind them: users don’t read full stories. They scan. According to research by Nielsen Norman Group, people read only about 20% of what’s on a page. The rest? Ignored, skimmed, or rage-closed.
So I pushed back—with data, not attitude. I ran heatmaps, showed scroll behavior, even mocked up two versions and ran a test. When they saw that users never made it past the first three lines, the lightbulb finally went off.
But not all feedback is bad—some of it’s brilliant. When someone says, “This flow feels awkward,” that’s gold. Or when a non-designer flags something that feels off—those moments? That’s when you listen. Not because they have a design degree, but because they have a different lens. And that’s what makes design better.
The real art is knowing when to speak up and when to shut up and learn something.
Design isn’t about blindly defending every pixel, but it’s also not about folding every time someone throws a vague comment your way. It’s about balance. Stand your ground when it matters. But always stay curious. Always come back to the user.
And maybe—just maybe—mute the group chat every once in a while.
