What to ask your agency about testimonial sections

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on testimonial sections, these questions are worth asking early.

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

A specific quote beats five vague ones. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Unattributed praise reads as invented. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

The short version

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Three things worth confirming about testimonial sections before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Unattributed praise reads as invented — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.