Servage Magazine

Web designers are human and carry attributes a human being should have. Therefore, we naturally believe our work and perspectives are the correct one. Whatever we design, we believe that we are doing the right things in the right manner. If we were to allow anyone to make changes, it would be our supervisor or senior colleague.

This way of doing things is essential to maintain self-confidence and avoid indecisiveness. On the other side of the coin, this can be fatal for our creativity and growth in our career. If someone critiques our work, there are some possibilities to get good insights through their criticisms, whether they are an end user or expert, like you.

Feedback Sources

In the practical life of a web designer, getting proper feedback depends on your position in the industry. If a designer is part of a  company or team, there are enough chances to get instant feedback from coworkers or team members working on the same project. However, it is difficult for a freelancer to enjoy such valuable feedback. Yet, there are other options for a freelancer, such as getting feedback from other freelancers in the same industry, as long as they are part of one’s professional network.

Today, social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are a very convenient and effective tool to get instant feedback on your work. You can send samples/portions of your work to a selected audience through Twitter or place a post for general opinions on Facebook. If you want to expand your audience further, you can use dedicated critique sites and forums like “Please Critique Me” and “r/design critiques” (from Reddit) and so on. With professional critiques, you can get quality and technically sound feedback that is not possible by other means.

Feedback Gathering Tools

Apart from technical criticisms, you can obtain general criticism through various tools and people. In the market, some feedback gathering tools include:

• Concept Feedback – can give you opportunity to collect constructive and actionable feedback over your concept from an active community.

• FiveSecondTest (FST)-  is a sort of guerrilla research tool that covers random visitors for just 5 seconds for usability, like tests.

• Crettica – will give you feedback over marketing concepts in a limited manner

• Notable – has a Firefox plug-in that permits you to exchange feedbacks on any website or web application without leaving your browser. You can get feedback from tech as well as non-tech people in a timely fashion.

As stated earlier social media is a hot spot for us to get real feedback from real people by and large. You can use social media monitoring tools to collect valuable inputs for you like:

• Icerocket – assists you to keep watch over twitter, many blogs, web in general, news, images and others. You can use its features like, topic cloud and basic listing of mentions to gather good data.

• Addict-o-matic – is a good free tool to collect and summarize all your buzz at one point through an attractive interface and one-page dashboard.

• Broadtracker – helps you to explore various message boards, forums, etc. effectively with topic cloud and influencers list features.

Benefits of Feedbacks

With good feedback from different people, you can get a view of your work through different lenses. For instance, your peer or your colleague may hesitate to tell the hard or bitter truth, but a user from your client side may give you an entire perspective that you or your team might have overlooked. A habit of getting regular feedback from various channels, will certainly help to keep you active in your profession, while providing plenty of opportunities to constantly improve your performance in various aspects of your career.

References & More Reading

Why Getting Feedback is Vital for Freelance Web Designers

10 Excellent Feedback Tools for Web Designers

12 Social Media Monitoring Tools Reviewed