What to say instead of "just make it pop"

“Make it pop” sounds like direction. It is really a feeling looking for a translator.

Reviewers who say it aren’t wrong to feel that something’s off. What they usually lack is the vocabulary to say what: hierarchy, contrast, whitespace, alignment. Design researchers who study critique sessions describe exactly this pattern: a visceral sense that a screen “isn’t working,” expressed through comments like “it feels heavy,” “it’s clunky,” or “make it pop,” none of which point at a fixable cause (Boast Image, “How to Decode Vague Feedback Like ‘Make It Pop’”).

Without a specific target, a designer guesses: usually by turning up contrast, adding motion, or introducing color until the screen feels different. Different isn’t the same as better, and the next round of feedback is just as likely to ask for the opposite.

Name the actual problem

Every vague note is standing in for a specific one. “Make it pop” is usually one of:

• Weak hierarchy: the eye doesn’t know where to land first.
• A buried CTA: the action is competing with five other elements for attention.
• A hero that’s loud but says nothing: the volume is fine, the message underneath is the problem.

Translating the vague version into the specific one is the actual job of a design critique. It’s also, according to UX practitioners who run structured critique sessions, the single biggest lever on how many rounds a review takes: specific feedback is faster to act on and produces measurably fewer revision loops than open-ended reactions (Jakob Nielsen, “How to Run a UX Design Critique”).

Loudness and emphasis are different things

Emphasis comes from structure: size, spacing, position, and contrast used with intent. Turning every dial up at once does not produce it.

When everything on a screen is fighting to stand out, nothing does. The wood type block above makes the point visually: pack every letter to the same size and press them together, and the eye has nowhere to rest. A single word set with room around it is more legible than the same word crammed into a dense block of others.

A better way to give the feedback

If you’re the one reacting to a screen and can’t immediately name the design principle, ask instead of instructing:

“Is the problem that I can’t tell what to do next, or that the page doesn’t feel like it matches how good the product actually is?”

That single reframe turns “make it pop” into a hierarchy problem or a brand-perception problem. Two very different problems, and neither solution is “louder.”

Protect the idea from a thousand small tweaks

Good concepts rarely die in one bad meeting. They die from an accumulation of small, unaligned adjustments: a bigger button here, a brighter color there, each individually defensible, none of them tied back to a goal.

Before asking an element to be brighter, bigger, or bolder, ask what job it’s doing. If nobody can answer that in one sentence, the element doesn’t need to be louder. It needs to be reconsidered.