What feedback tools are you using for getting feedbacks from the clients or sending feedbacks to the designers? Are you still using emails to transfer the mockups or design JPEGs? I have an idea of developing an online tool/service for website design feedback exchange between designers and clients. It works as follows: Designers registers an account on our site, and then can upload one or more JPEGs, after uploading, he gets a private link to send to the client. The client accesses the link and comes a page listing the JPEGs similarly as a gallery (in full size), he can highlight some area of each image, add notes/suggestions to the image. After the feedbacks are done, the client can click "send" to send the feedbacks to the designer. This kind of tools can avoid files transfer between designer and client via email or third party file sending tool. All feedbacks are kept online and easy-to-understand. I believe there is some market. How do you think? I know there are some competitors, but I want to give it a try. I actually have https://www.userimprove.com, but it works different than the tool I described above.
Would be more useful if it did so allowing for an actual HTML/CSS layout -- since drawing a goof assed pretty picture of a website is a half-assed approach to web design; which is why the people who draw pretty pictures of websites as a rule have no business designing jack ****! See why 99% of the stupid little personal pages and sites for brick and mortars where the Internet is an afterthought are the only places you see such idiocy -- while I'm willing to bet the PSD jockey is the low man on the totem pole at all the real Internet success stories -- like Google, Amazon, E-Bay, Slashdot, Facebook, etc. Because as pretty as those PSD's that wow the clients usually are, from an accessibility, usability and maintainability standpoint they are most always miserable steaming piles of /FAIL/ due to design choices that are made out of ignorance, stupidity, or just plain wishful thinking... It's why when I was dealing with "designers" my hand would raise up into drill sergeant knife hand ready to deliver a pimp slap whenever they'd say "But I can do it in Photoshop"... as if that has ANYTHING to do with designing a clean, easy to use accessible website. Again, such nonsense is all flash, and no substance. Discussion of content to go on each pages, semantic markup of that content or a reasonable facsimile, create the multiple layouts using CSS and what's now being called "responsive design" -- THEN you bring in the PSD jockey to piss all over it with their pointless graphics... Because people visit websites for the content, not the goofy **** you hang around it.
Mind you -- do NOT take my comment as a direct criticism of the idea of a better collaboration tool -- the ability to load either a PSD or a website and then layer annotations over it with a client is a good one... I just shy away from the "draw a picture before you even have markup" approach to "design." It makes no sense other than eliciting a quick "wow" from ignorant clients who don't know the first thing about building successful websites -- you know the types, the ones who say they want "Web 2.0" and "HTML 5" not because they understand what they are, but because they saw them mentioned in Forbes and are throwing the terms around as sick marketspeak buzzwords -- again, taking technical advice from Forbes is like taking financial advice from Popular Electronics. Makes even less sense for those of us who were doing what's now called "responsive layout" a decade before we got media queries (mcswitcy, semi-fluid with min-width drop, graceful degataion -- all the same thing) Drawing a pretty picture of one layout rarely takes having multiple layouts for different size displays fluid/semi-fluid widths and dynamic heights, much less dynamic fonts into account.
Why not make a script which opens your website prototype and gives your client some annotation tools? I'm not talking about a bookmarklet, more like a mix between collaboration software and Skitch.
I agree with some of your opinions like some clients are "ignorant". But at the same time, for most of clients, discussing with them too deep is much time-consuming, meaningless, obscure or even misleading than creating some mockups or designs and then send them for review and approval. The images are the best communication media between the designers/developers and the clients.