How to Make Design Approval Painless

The worst part of being a designer is getting design approval from stakeholders. The more stakeholders, the worse it gets. All too often you get stuck in revision hell, reduced to nothing more than a pixel pusher, implementing the client’s ill-informed suggestions.

So in this post, I want to share five techniques I use for avoiding this problem. I have based the advice on my experience as a user interface designer, but many of the tips will apply whatever design discipline you work in.

I hope they help.

Prepare the Ground

We can avoid much of the pain of design approval if you prepare the ground before putting pen to paper.

A large part of the conflict surrounding design approval comes from different opinions around roles and responsibilities. Most designers consider it their responsibility to define the design direction, while clients feel their views are of equal, or even greater, value.

Where Things Go Wrong

The first problem is that the client typically focuses on the wrong thing, providing feedback based on their aesthetic tastes.

The second problem is that clients typically express their feedback as a fix to their perceived problem. They make comments like “I don’t like the blue, change it to pink”. That is problematic because the designer doesn’t understand the underlying problem. Without understanding the problem, they do not know if changing the colour to pink is a good idea or not, or if there is a preferable approach.

These issues are not the client’s mistake because nobody has taught them the nature of their role. That is why, at the start of a project, I do exactly that.

Educate the Client About Roles

I explain that the expertise the client brings is a knowledge of the business requirements and the audience we are trying to reach. By contrast, my expertise lies in user interface design and how people behave online.

I encourage the client to express their feedback in terms of problems they see in business needs or user challenges.

My job is then to come up with solutions to these problems.

For example, instead of saying “change the blue to pink” express the underlying problem, which might be “I am concerned that the blue might make our brand feel too corporate for our pre-teen female audience.”

It then falls to me as a designer to work out how best to solve that problem. I may choose to change the colour or find an alternative way of softening the design.

Of course, even if you explain this upfront, the client will still fall into old habits during the project and start expressing solutions. However, if you have defined this role at the outset, then at least you can remind them to explain the underlying problem and to do so in business requirements or user needs.

However, just because it is your role to come up with solutions, it does not mean you should exclude the client from that process. I involve the client in creating the design as much as possible.

Involve Your Client

Part of the reason a client rejects a design is that they are not invested in it. However, if they had a hand in creating the design, then they will feel a sense of ownership, and they are much less likely to reject their work.

What is more, if the client feels that the design is at least partly their creation, then they will be more likely to defend it to colleagues who criticise it.

How then do we involve the client in the design process, without them undermining the quality?

To answer that question, let’s look at where the problems lie. Typically criticism of a website’s design falls into one of two categories. The client is either:

• Unhappy with the aesthetics and how it feels.
• Unhappy with the content and visual hierarchy.

In the latter case, it almost always comes down to the client wanting to stuff the page with far more content than the user can process. To avoid this problem, I typically run a user attention point exercise or carry out some group wireframing exercises.

The real challenge comes when the client expresses dissatisfaction over aesthetics. Comments like “it just doesn’t pop” or “it feels too corporate” really don’t help, once you have sunk hours into creating a design.

To overcome these problems, it helps to involve the client in a limited way to establish the aesthetics. I do this through two exercises.

The first is called the reception room exercise. In it, I encourage the client to design the perfect reception area for their office, telling me about the furniture, music and space itself. As they talk, they will use words like “spacious”, “friendly” and “professional”. Any such words we write on a board and these become the basis for the design.

By focusing them on a reception room, rather than a website, it gets the client to think more abstractly about their brand and not get too bogged down in the website itself.

You can take this further and then moodboard some of those individual words with the client, picking out fonts, images and colours together.

Together these exercises help define a design direction that you can refer back to later and show that you have taken their feedback on board. That will make a big difference in securing design approval.

However, there is one final way of making the client feel involved in the creation of the design, and that is to show them work often and early.

Show Your Work Early and Often

One of the hardest things to do as a designer is to show clients half-formed ideas, but it is one of the best ways of avoiding problems with design approval. That is because the “big reveal” most designers favour is probably the worst way of presenting a design.

The problem with the big reveal is that no matter how good your design, it is almost sure to come as a shock to your client. Whatever you have produced, it will be different from what the client had envisioned, and that almost always causes an adverse reaction. Yes, in time, they may come to appreciate what you have done, but first impressions are hard to overcome.

However, if we start showing clients concepts early, even at the pen and paper stage, we begin to shift their expectations. They see the design gradually evolve and so the final design is less of a surprise.

This approach also has the added advantage of allowing you to course-correct before you invest too much time into a design with which the client takes issue.

Talking of feedback, you can significantly increase the chances of gaining design approval is you more carefully control the feedback process.

Control the Feedback Process

When the moment comes to get the client’s approval for a design, most designers ask their client some variant of “are you happy to sign this off” or worst still “what do you think?”

In both cases, the emphasis is in the client’s opinion. What do you think? Are you happy?

However, a good designer won’t be creating a design for the client. They will design to meet user needs and business objectives. Why then are we asking the client what they think? It only encourages them to fall back on their personal preferences and tastes.

Instead, when we ask for feedback, we should encourage the client to focus on the elements that matter by asking pertinent questions such as:

• Does the design achieve our agreed business objectives?
• Does the design meet the needs of our chosen audience?
• Does the design reflect the brand keywords we decided at the start of the project?
• Is the design in line with previous wireframes and moodboards we produced?

If the client finds themselves answering yes to all of those questions, then suddenly, their personal preferences seem less critical and they are more likely to give design approval.

However, I would go a step further. Not only would I suggest we guide our client away from relying on their personal opinion, but I would also downplay the whole idea of getting design approval from them.

Test Your Design, Rather Than Asking the Client for Design Approval

I have two problems with the idea of design approval. First, it assumes that the client is qualified to approve a design in the first place. Second, it presumes that the design needs finalising. I take issues with both of these.

Let’s take the second, first. Why does a design need to be signed off?

Why Does a Design Need to Be Approved?

Getting a client to approve a design made a lot of sense in the print era because once you sent the design to print, the cost of making changes is prohibitively expensive. However, that is not true in the digital world.

If the client changes their mind about the colour, it takes a few lines of CSS to change it. If they are no longer sure about the font, five minutes later you can see what an alternative looks like.

A lot of the time, it is the very idea of having to commit to a design that causes the client to equivocate over approving it. They feel a pressure to get it right when, of course, no treatment is ever perfect.

Instead, we should be encouraging our clients to see the design as an evolving thing. We should not see the design that we launch as the final version, but rather the first step in ongoing iteration.

The design should evolve based on user feedback, which brings me on to my other reason for disliking design approval. Neither the client nor the designer should be the ultimate judge of whether a design is ‘ready’ to proceed to build. That role should belong to the user.

Why Should the Client (Or Designer) Be the One to Approve The Design?

We should be testing a design to ascertain whether it is ready. We can run first-click and five-second tests to judge if the information architecture and visual hierarchy are correct.

As for aesthetics, well, we can run a survey to see if the user associates the keywords we defined at the start of the process with your design.

If the client wanted the design to be “spacious”, “friendly” and “professional”, the best way of ascertaining whether it has done that is to put it in front of users and see what they think.

You can do all of these tests quickly and cheaply using a service like Usability Hub. You can post the tests online, define your audience and for not much more than a dollar per user get results back in an hour.

If you tested with 30 people to make sure you account for any outliers in your results, you would have paid $30 to save yourself hours of debate and potentially days of revisions.

Design Approval is a Relic of the Past

I would argue that the idea of design approval is a relic of the past, that as web designers, we should be abandoning. It undermines the concept of iterative, testing based design and often damages the client/designer relationship.

I do believe that the client should play a pivotal role in defining the design, but that does not mean they are the judge of whether it is acceptable or not. However, equally, I don’t think the designer gets to say that either. Design is subjective, so ultimately the only people who get to decide if the design is right are the people who will be using it and whose opinion matters — our users.