Don't Stop at "Make It Look Good": How to Communicate the Goal

A "look" request and a "goal" are different things

An instruction like "make me a cool landing page" is really just a "look" request. Even if the colors and layout come together nicely, something essential — like the sign-up button — often ends up buried in the background.

The reason this happens is simple: you haven't told it what "success" looks like. Given only a look-based instruction, it can only respond with a plausible, good-looking pattern, leaving the page's actual purpose to guesswork.

Communicate what counts as success before you communicate decoration requests. That's the line that separates a "look" request from a "goal."

A goal is communicated as a set: elements plus priority

So what exactly is a "goal"? A phrasing like "just get the event name, date, venue, and sign-up link across — keep decoration minimal" actually packs in two pieces of information. One is the elements that absolutely can't be left out, and the other is priority.

Listing elements alone, without priority, gets everything treated as "equally important," and the result tends to end up half-baked across the board. On the other hand, a single line like "keep decoration minimal" gives it a clear signal that getting the information across matters more than looks. Always communicate elements and priority together, as a set.

Here's roughly what that instruction looks like in practice.

$ claude
> Build the top section of the landing page.
> Just get the event name, date, venue, and sign-up link across. Keep decoration minimal.

What matters isn't how short the sentence is — it's whether these two pieces of information are in there. You don't need to cram it into one sentence; a bullet list works fine too.

If the goal stays vague, revisions just eat up time

If you keep revising without ever communicating the goal, you end up circling through surface-level tweaks — changing fonts, adjusting colors — over and over. The look changes, but it's not unusual for the essential element to stay buried the whole time.

Once you've clearly communicated the goal, though, the revision requests themselves start to shrink. Instead of "the button doesn't stand out," saying "the sign-up button is buried, and the sign-up link isn't doing its job" gives whoever's fixing it a clear sense of what to prioritize.

The goal isn't just for the first instruction — it becomes the standard you return to every time you ask for a revision.

Summary

Communicate the goal, not a look request. That alone changes both how long the back-and-forth takes and how precise the result is.

Once communicating the goal becomes a habit, you start getting back what you actually wanted without having to specify every visual detail one by one. The back-and-forth of revising the same thing over and over starts to shrink.

This isn't limited to the top of a landing page. Button placement, form fields, notification copy — this is a pattern you'll run into again and again whenever you ask Claude Code for something.

Next time you ask for something, try leading with what would count as success.