Words by Piers TincknellFebruary 28, 2018
In this series I am going to look at how to ask better questions when presented with a website design that will help to critique the functional design of the project.
Everyone has an opinion when it comes to website design and everyone wants their voice to be heard when it comes to providing feedback. We love getting our clients involved at all stages of the website design process and we take a very collaborative approach. In our experience we have identified two types of feedback that you can give that is constructive to the design process.
Both of these pieces of feedback are very important and clients are normally more prepared to give the aesthetic feedback than the functionality. The problems then arise in the future when the client is using the website and realise that things aren’t quite working how they imagined.
Example: Looking at varying title lengths in blog posts / articles.
An example of how your designer might present a blog over view page.
If this was presented to you as a prototype for your News page archive you might think
Yes I like this, it’s very clean and easy to read and I love that it is so neat!
It does look neat but this design presents a few other things that you should think about. The questions that you should ask from a functionality / critique point of view are:
These 4 questions are a great critique of the current design.
A better example of how a blog overview might look.
Asking these questions has helped to ensure that what is being designed for you is flexible and can function with lots of varying content. Digital design studios will already know this, but sometimes you might know something that the designer doesn’t and so it’s best to alway look at designs with a critical eye about how it will work as well as what it looks like.