The Fear of Feedback

I'm feeling a bit sentimental these days, so this is a quick but rather touchy-feely post about gracefully anticipating client feedback. Sometimes there's dread surrounding the moment where you send off a design to a client for approval. There's a lot of excitement and pride but - if we're honest here - also fear and fatigue. More fatigue than fear perhaps because there's a tremendous amount of planning that goes into design, but it is more often than not, not obvious in the final product. Design is an iterative process. It never works on first draft, it's not a simple translation for wireframes to mock ups, and the better it functions to communicate what it needs to, the less -- it seems -- the work that went into it is actually visible.

The way we work at Archinodes involves a long series of exchanges via Atrium, as pictured here (below). For one interface mock up, the process can involve more than 100 comments via feedback loops, between Nodes, before it is ever seen by the client. The client sees the design for their first round of feedback after numerous (internal) versions and reworkings. This is the invisible labour of design made increasingly visible through careful documentation of process. We're big on process at Archinodes, and -- to end on a good note -- it's documenting process that provides you all the evidence of creative labour that you may need to lessen the dread -- the worry that you've overlooked an important detail.