[Quiz] What does “make it pop” actually mean?

An unscientific translation game for design feedback, and what to ask instead.

Someone senior looks at your design for a few seconds and says, “Can we make it pop?” Nobody asks what “pop” means. The review moves on. Congratulations, you now have feedback.

Vague design feedback rarely tells you the actual problem. It arrives as “make it more intuitive”, “it feels empty” or “Apple does it this way”. The person may have noticed something real. They just haven’t given you enough information to know what it is.

So, let’s see how well you translate it.

Twelve comments, about three minutes. For each one, choose what you think the person most likely means. Don’t pick the answer you think a good designer should choose. Go with your first interpretation.

(And try not to imagine the exact colleague who said it.)

1. “Can we make it pop?”

What do they mean?

• A) The hierarchy is too weak.
• B) They personally dislike the colour.
• C) The business priority is not visible enough.
• D) Nobody has agreed on what the screen should prioritise.

2. “Can we make it more intuitive?”

Translation?

• A) The label is unclear.
• B) The interaction behaves differently from what they expected.
• C) There are too many choices.
• D) They watched one person struggle and have already diagnosed the entire problem.

3. “It feels too empty.”

What are they actually seeing?

• A) Important information is missing.
• B) The spacing makes related elements feel disconnected.
• C) They are uncomfortable with whitespace.
• D) The page does not communicate enough value.

4. “Users might not notice this.”

What might be behind the comment?

• A) The element does not have enough visual prominence.
• B) It appears in the wrong place or at the wrong time.
• C) The business wants more people to interact with it.
• D) It took weeks to build, so someone wants it seen.

5. “Apple does it this way.”

What does that tell you?

• A) The pattern may already be familiar to users.
• B) Apple has probably tested it.
• C) The implementation looks polished.
• D) Referring to Apple feels more convincing than explaining the reasoning.

6. “This should be simple.”

What kind of simple?

• A) Fewer screens.
• B) Fewer decisions for the user.
• C) Less implementation work.
• D) A complicated system that looks simple from the outside.

7. “Can you give us a few more options?”

Why do they want them?

• A) The current direction is not convincing enough.
• B) They want to check whether a stronger solution exists.
• C) Nobody has agreed on the criteria for choosing.
• D) Making a decision feels risky, and more options postpone it.

8. “Can we make it feel more premium?”

What does premium mean here?

• A) More restrained colours and typography.
• B) More space and fewer visible controls.
• C) Stronger imagery and brand presence.
• D) Whatever the person asking associates with expensive products.

9. “Can we move this above the fold?”

Why?

• A) It is essential to the user’s next step.
• B) It supports an important business goal.
• C) Someone is worried that users will not scroll.
• D) Everything is important, so everything must fit in the first 700 pixels.

10. “Can we make it cleaner?”

What needs cleaning?

• A) There is too much information.
• B) The hierarchy is unclear.
• C) The spacing and alignment are inconsistent.
• D) The reviewer wants fewer things on the screen without deciding which things can go.

11. “Can we make it more engaging?”

What kind of engagement?

• A) More people completing the task.
• B) More people interacting with the feature.
• C) More visual movement or personality.
• D) A number on someone’s quarterly goals.

12. “Something feels off.”

What did they notice?

• A) The visual details are inconsistent.
• B) The screen does not feel like the rest of the product.
• C) The content and hierarchy suggest different priorities.
• D) It is different from the version they pictured in their head.

What this vague design feedback might mean

Ready? The answer to every question is the same:

There isn’t enough information.

That does not mean the feedback is useless. It means the comment describes a reaction without telling you what caused it. Someone can notice a real problem without having the language to diagnose it.

I try to separate three things:

• What did the person notice?
• Why does it concern them?
• What change are they proposing?

Those three things often arrive compressed into one sentence, or with two of them missing. “Users might not notice this” mixes an observation with a prediction. “Make it pop” jumps straight to a visual direction. “Apple does it this way” offers a solution before establishing whether the same problem exists. Your job is to find the concern underneath the comment before you start changing the design. Here is what I would ask next.

1. “Can we make it pop?”

Ask: “Which part should attract attention first, and what should the user do next?”

“Make it pop” usually means something does not feel prominent enough. You still need to know what deserves more attention and why.

Changing the colour might satisfy someone’s preference without improving the hierarchy. Making several elements louder can leave the screen with even less focus than before.

The answer should tell you whether the concern is visual hierarchy, business priority, interaction or taste.

2. “Can we make it more intuitive?”

Ask: “Where do you expect users to hesitate, and what would they expect to happen instead?”

“Intuitive” often means “worked the way I expected”. That expectation might come from another product, a familiar pattern or the reviewer’s own experience.

Find the moment where expectation and behaviour stop matching. Then you can decide whether the problem is the label, the interaction, the number of choices or something else.

Without that detail, “make it intuitive” can become several rounds of moving things around until the screen feels familiar to the loudest person in the room.

3. “It feels too empty.”

Ask: “What information or action feels missing?”

An empty screen may be missing useful content. It may also have poor grouping, weak hierarchy or simply more whitespace than the reviewer is used to.

If nobody can name what is missing, adding more content probably will not improve it. The empty space may be helping people understand what matters.

4. “Users might not notice this.”

Ask: “What happens if users don’t notice it at this point?”

This separates a usability risk from a business preference.

If missing the element prevents someone from completing the task, you may justify stronger prominence. If the business wants more people to interact with an optional feature, that is a different discussion.

Visibility is not free. Every element made more prominent pushes something else down the hierarchy.

5. “Apple does it this way.”

Ask: “Which part of Apple’s approach solves our problem?”

Looking at established products can be useful. Familiar patterns reduce what users need to learn, and mature products can give us good references.

Apple may still be solving a different problem for different users, devices and business constraints. A screenshot does not explain the decisions behind it.

Keep the reference, but check whether it fits.

6. “This should be simple.”

Ask: “Which part can we remove without creating another problem?”

A simple experience may require complicated logic behind the scenes. Fewer screens can also mean denser screens. Less explanation can make the page look cleaner, but it can also make the decision harder.

Sometimes this comment is a reasonable request to reduce scope. Sometimes it means the difficult parts have not been discussed yet.

The best version is not always the one with the fewest steps. It is the one that asks for no more effort than the task genuinely requires.

7. “Can you give us a few more options?”

Ask: “What question should the additional options help us answer?”

Exploring alternatives can expose assumptions we missed in the first direction. That is useful when each option tests a real trade-off.

Three versions with slightly different layouts only create the appearance of exploration. The review becomes a preference poll, and the most familiar option usually wins.

More options help when the team knows what it needs to compare.

8. “Can we make it feel more premium?”

Ask: “What feels less premium in the current version?”

“Premium” might mean restrained, polished, exclusive, spacious or expensive-looking. Those ideas do not always point in the same visual direction.

Ask for an example if needed, then ask what they like about it. The useful part may be the typography, imagery, motion, amount of content or level of detail.

A reference is more useful once you know which quality you are borrowing from it.

9. “Can we move this above the fold?”

Ask: “Why does the user need to see it before scrolling?”

Important content often deserves early visibility. Trouble starts when product, marketing, sales and operations all have something important.

The first screen has limited space. Moving one item up changes the priority of everything around it.

This question makes the trade-off visible. If the team cannot explain why the user needs it immediately, its current position may be fine.

10. “Can we make it cleaner?”

Ask: “What feels distracting or harder to understand?”

“Cleaner” may mean removing content, improving alignment, strengthening hierarchy or giving elements more space.

Those are different problems. Removing useful information because a screen looks busy can make the product easier to look at and harder to use.

Find out what is creating the feeling before deciding that fewer elements are the answer.

11. “Can we make it more engaging?”

Ask: “What behaviour are we trying to increase?”

Engagement is too broad to design for directly.

Do we want more people to start the task, complete it, return later, explore another feature or spend longer on the page? Those goals can require completely different changes.

If nobody can name the behaviour, adding animation or visual personality may make the product livelier without improving anything measurable.

12. “Something feels off.”

Ask: “What did you expect to see or understand that you don’t?”

This may be the vaguest comment in the quiz, but it is not automatically useless.

Experienced reviewers sometimes notice a mismatch before they can name it. Give them a moment to locate the discomfort.

They may identify a real inconsistency. They may uncover a larger flow problem. They may also realise that the design is simply different from what they imagined.

All three are more useful than moving elements around until the uncomfortable feeling disappears.

So, how did you score?

If you confidently selected an answer for all twelve, congratulations. You may have just redesigned the product around assumptions nobody confirmed.

If you kept thinking, “It could be any of these,” you got the point.

Feedback often signals that something feels wrong. It is rarely a reliable diagnosis of what is wrong.

That does not mean everyone around us needs to learn how to give perfectly structured design feedback. A stakeholder may understand the business risk better than the hierarchy. An engineer may notice an interaction that will be difficult to build. Someone seeing the flow for the first time may feel the same confusion a user will feel later.

Their wording may be vague, but their reaction can still contain useful information.

You do not need to accept the proposed fix. You also do not need to defend the design immediately. Ask enough questions to understand the concern, then decide whether anything needs to change.

Sometimes “make it pop” really does mean increasing the contrast.

It just should not be your first assumption.

Which one do you hear most often? Tell me in the comments, especially if your team has invented an even vaguer version.

Further reading

• Why design reviews talk about logic before looks
• Reviewing UX work in 15 minutes without missing what matters
• 10 questions I ask to make better design decisions
• The more senior I get, the less I want to win every design argument

[Quiz] What does “make it pop” actually mean? was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.