Make Feedback Part of Your Design Process

How to track, manage and prioritize feedback in your design sprints

When done right feedback helps improve products, propels processes forward and helps spread, as well as improve ideas.

When it’s not done right, however, bad feedback can cause confusion, lead to delays, create frustrations, drain energy from the team.

Whether from your customers, team mates or external experts, feedback is a key component in development and design process. Feedback is vital — be it a marketing campaign or a product development sprint. It’s a cornerstone of every project.

This article is not so much about what good and bad feedback as much as it is about creating an environment for correct feedback. But before we delve into that consider these three examples of how abundantly feedback is exchanged from start to finish and really, the basis on which the wheel turns.

Internal feedback: Slack’s organic design process

Slack is a popular example of testing the product extensively internally — eating their own dogfood. Which means that even before the end users of Slack have received an update or caught a bug somewhere, there is massive testing among the hundreds of Slack employees. They all try out the system and share feedback.

Feedback kicks off their design process. “A vague problem statement” is defined from the internal feedback that has been received, as well as the customer tickets. Following this everyone gets context and problem scope is understood in a kickoff meeting, followed by investigations and a post kick off discussion.

“Following the post-kickoff, design critiques happen twice a week. When a designer feels ready, she shows her work for feedback from the larger product team. While the larger team may offer feedback to the design pair, the “lead” designer remains the clear point of contact with the product manager.”

Dogfooding provides Slack’s team with feedback on a variety of use cases. For example, feedback from the accounting department gives the development team an idea about the ease of sharing documents in Slack and the user journey for an accounting team to communicate on the platform. For a team as flexible and transparent as Slack, you can be sure that the volume of feedback exchanged would be a lot.

Feedback across the length of the process: Adobe’s outline of their UX Design Process

When laying out their UX design process, one thing that stands out in Adobe’s words is “context for existence”. To understand context, there is a need for brainstorming sessions, discussions, and definitions of the problem. Teams at Adobe conduct stakeholder interviews and conduct a kick off meeting to start it off. This is followed by product research, analysis, creating personas, user experience maps, and finally designing the prototypes and wireframes.

The feedback collected from users during the course of validation exercises forms the last leg, yet a major pillar, of their process. As Adobe puts it very aptly, UX design isn’t a linear process.

There is overlap in the various stages and considerable back-and-forth. But why is all this back-and-forth worth worrying over? Well.

“Communication is a key UX design skill. While doing great design is one thing, communicating great design is equally as important, as even the best concepts will fail if they don’t accept by the team and stakeholders. That’s why the best UX designers are great communicators.”

That hits the spot.

The value of feedback in the design process is second to none and understanding how to exchange it in a constructive and efficient manner is what helps drive the process.

External Feedback: How Lufthansa improves user experience

Lufthansa uses Usabilla to optimize the experience for website visitors. The Lufthansa team tags and sorts customer feedback into three main categories: technical issues, general usability, and project input. They track where users may have left the website, what areas they got stuck on or if there are any possible bugs harming the customer’s experience.

By using screenshots to understand the context of the issues and tracking analytics to mine for patterns, Lufthansa is able to provide a more fulfilling experience for it’s customers. The best part is that the customers identify areas of concern readily and share their feedback.

“Lufthansa finds its users are willing to leave feedback and actively pinpoint any problems. By collecting this kind of qualitative feedback, you can immediately identify bugs, errors, or simply things that don’t work the way your users expect them to.”

External feedback is invaluable because it shows gaps between what is intended by the designer and how an audience interprets the design.

Harnessing the power of feedback

In all the instances mentioned, feedback is not simply a by-product of the process but a key objective and proponent for success.

There can roughly be the following aspects of feedback:

Collecting feedback and tracking the entire volume

Measuring key metrics and drawing conclusions

Translating the feedback and conclusions into actionable intel

Prioritizing the implementation of changes

But getting these right itself, can be a challenge. Here are some things to keep in mind.

Have a goal when collecting feedback

What area are you trying to optimize? Is it a specific part of the user journey you are trying to investigate? How does the data impact business goals — does it lead to more conversions eventually or does it boost retention?

The same goes for internal feedback. Michelle Chan pin pointed a very important thing about design critiques while interning at Uber and Tesla. When you present to your team, give them context and specify the kind of feedback you are looking for. Without it, your internal review will not provide the right feedback.

Contextual feedback also saves time because time isn’t wasted in trying to recreate the issues. Rather using screenshots or images help cut to the chase and ensure quick turnaround on feedback.

Identify the right channels, people and methods

Having an objective takes care of the why. Decide upon the how and the who. Picking the right user segment is imperative to getting feedback relevant to your objectives. Using the right methods to gather feedback is the rest of the puzzle. Would a survey do the trick or would a contextual interview be better?

If you’re working with a subject matter expert, understand the best way to collaborate and collect feedback. Use tools that are accessible to them and not just your designers and developers. Since in this scenario time is at a premium, getting the feedback in a quick and efficient way is important to reduce wastage of resources for everyone.

The right tools help

This is pretty much following up from the point above. Using tools that are accessible to everyone on the team so that managers or designers — everyone can be on the same page saves time and effort.

Project management tools like Basecamp or Asana are useful for organizing and managing the volume of feedback.

However, just a project management tool is not enough. There are gaps when trying to connect external and internal feedback. Also, tracking the vast volume of feedback across the length of the process, right from definition to validation, can become overwhelming. Translating this volume of feedback into actionable tasks can help teams achieve faster turnaround times.

zipBoard helps manage the volume and context of feedback

All these issues are addressed by zipBoard, which provides context and visual tracking for teams so that time is not spent recreating issues between various teams.

Not all feedback is equal

Prioritize feedback. Be sure to check what aligns with your product and business goals. A very simple example is the philosophy followed by Crazy Egg’s product team when deciding what new features to provide and how much value would that generate for the user.

The priority matrix followed by Crazy Egg’s product team. source: Typeform blog

Similarly, whether you’re a designer or developer, knowing what feedback is relevant to your current situation can help make life simpler and manage the volume of feedback. Not that feedback with lower priority has to be chucked away, only that it may not align with the present scenario.

TL; DR

The importance of feedback to processes and productivity can be judged by the sheer number of collaboration tools now populating the market. The focus is on making feedback more visual and contextual. Whether feedback originates internally from within the team or from external stakeholders like SMEs or customers, there are challenges to exchanging constructive feedback. Keeping in mind certain guidelines and using the right tools to aid in this effort can make sure feedback serves the prophecy of being a gift for your team.