2mo
Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback.
As the review itself states, this experience was based on less than one month of employment. We believe that context matters. The first few weeks in our design role are intentionally focused on onboarding: understanding our products, client expectations, target audiences, compliance requirements, copyright considerations, and the quality standards required for commercial client work.
We want to clarify that designers at 5U Website are expected to communicate directly with clients. However, client communication is introduced gradually. Before a designer independently advises multiple clients or makes design recommendations on behalf of the company, they need to understand what the client is trying to achieve, what the end users actually need, what can realistically be delivered, and what legal, compliance, platform, and business limitations may apply. This is not meant to limit designers. It is meant to help them provide professional, accurate, and responsible service to clients.
We also welcome new ideas, including automation, workflow improvements, and creative design suggestions. At the same time, innovation has to be realistic. A good idea is not only something that looks creative or saves time in theory; it also needs to solve the right problem, work reliably, meet quality standards, and be useful to the client’s business. During onboarding, some suggestions may require more context, business review, technical validation, or compliance review before they can be adopted. When ideas are practical and aligned with client needs, we do adopt them and continue improving the solution.
For example, during this employment period, a website performance concern was raised: the site felt slow, and there was concern that adding more HTML pages would make the homepage load even slower. We discussed the issue and explained that the performance problem was more likely related to image sizing and optimization than the number of HTML pages. We recommended using PageSpeed Insights to test both desktop and mobile performance. That feedback was applied quickly, the speed issue was improved, and the additional pages were able to move forward. To us, this is a good example of how growth happens in real client work: noticing a problem, discussing it openly, identifying the real cause, using the right tool, and improving the final product.
This is also why, especially during the early onboarding stage, we ask new team members to internally confirm important client-facing recommendations before sending them out independently. If we were to tell a client not to add pages based on an incorrect diagnosis, and the client later realized that the conclusion was wrong, their trust in our professional advice would be affected. That would make the rest of the project harder for everyone. So yes, this is another “restriction” in our workflow — but it is also part of our quality control process and one of the ways we protect the client relationship.
We also want to clarify that we do not lower our quality standards simply because a client “doesn’t mind.” In client work, our responsibility is not only to create something visually interesting, but to create something useful for the client’s business and their end users. Sometimes we may decide not to use an effect, animation, or feature that looks impressive to us as designers if it creates noise, distraction, slower performance, or little practical value for the client’s customers. That is not about doing less. It is about making the right design decision for the right audience.
This is also how we approach automation. We do not reject automation because we dislike improvement. We simply believe that a workflow should first be understood manually, tested, validated, and proven to produce consistent results before it is automated. When someone is still learning what the process is, what the client needs, and what quality standard must be met, moving directly into automation can create more risk than value.
We take feedback seriously and will continue improving how we communicate expectations, onboarding steps, design decisions, and client communication responsibilities to new team members. We wish you the best in your future work.
