Recently at Digg, I started doing a weekly-ish company-wide design review. My feeling is that it’s essential to get feedback from the people in your company for two reasons: First, if there’s a decent amount of people in your company (say, 50+), they’re a good, quick snapshot of multiple user types. Second, enthusiasm is infectious, and it should start from within the company. In a general sense, if the employees of a company don’t love the product, why should anyone else?
So far, I’ve had one large and one small design review. Knowing there’d be the probability of a high volume of feedback and limited time to respond both communicatively and creatively, I asked for feedback to come in a particular format to make it as easy as possible for my team to digest. The “rules” were simple…
Send feedback via email. I want people to take the time to think about their suggestions, and not have too large of a forum for knee-jerk reactions. Group feedback sessions tend to move too quickly, and it becomes really difficult to record everyone’s opinion.
Provide context to your suggestions. By nature, feedback is subjective. Without understanding where someone is coming from or having inherent trust in their opinion, it’s difficult to turn “I don’t think that looks right” into something useful. The best way to do this is to provide a link to or an explanation of an example of where you feel something is done better.
I’m not the type of person who discounts someone’s ideas based upon who they are or what they do professionally – if you use the site, your point of view is valid. That being said, of all of the talents of my team – reading minds isn’t one of them (at least not to the best of my knowledge). With feedback, context is king.
When in doubt, draw it out. Ideas presented with visual support are much easier to understand. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hacked up screenshot or a camera phone snap of a bunch of boxes drawn on a napkin. Designers are visual people, so it easiest way to get convey an idea is to speak our language.
So where is this coming from? Besides the fact that I’m really excited about the design reviews at Digg and wanted to tell people about it, I noticed something on my sister’s Facebook stream this morning that I’ve seen happen a few times on my own.
I took a screen shot of it and wrote out a bit of feedback. Initially, the idea was to send the feedback directly to people I know at Facebook, but then decided to blog about it instead. Kill two birds with one stone, if you will.
The feedback was written following my own feedback rules, but with a bit more added structure. The part that I added, which I didn’t ask of my co-workers, was the inclusion of arguments. The context of this feedback is based upon the assumption that I’ve earned some amount of trust in my opinion over the span of my career.
Due to this, I wanted to present what I felt would be reasonable arguments to my feedback to help whoever read it decide whether the issue is worth looking into. Here’s what I was going to send…
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Summary (check out the image)
Denise posted on my sister’s wall “Are you in Texas” because she saw a group of pictures in Lisa’s stream that she was tagged in, with the associated album named “Driving to Texas”
Solution
The album name that’s displayed in the stream should have ownership attached to it, ie. “Driving to Texas by (First Name + Last Name)”
Support
The assumption based upon the information given is that my sister was driving to Texas because of the title of the album. It’s a safe assumption because there’s no context as to who’s album it is.
Arguments
This confusion is likely an edge case where most people probably don’t care about the context of the album, they only care to see pictures of their friends. Plus, If you click the picture, it displays whose album the pictures belong to in context of the album.
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I find collaboration with non-designers to be so important in design. Designers have a tendency to see things through a different lens than most people, which can be counter-productive when trying to find solutions across all use cases. I’d argue that one of that main reasons teams tend to design in a vacuum is because managing feedback is difficult and it’s extremely time-consuming to dissect subjective thought.
If someone uses the product, they have a valid point of view – period. Set expectations. You’ll have the ability to digest a larger amount of feedback in a shorter period of time and have best chance possible to turn anyone’s ideas into useful information for design.
3 Comments
Good read. Over at Vayner Media we have a round table discussion about the prospective design due to our small size but I will suggest emailing in suggestion. It is more concrete and you gain everyone’s input. Google Wave sounds useful for this too since it provides a timeline.
Great post, I’ve been confused myself with friends photos. I really like the format you suggest for design feedback, it really forces the user to put a lot of thought into what the real issue is and how you can address it.
Cool. I really like that you went through the exercise of a design review, following your own rules for how it should be conducted.
Guiding non-designers through design reviews is super critical to what we do. It’s our job to ensure that everyone feels they’ve been heard and that we get some useful, actionable feedback.
It seems that the more you’re able to include the larger team (outside of design), the more everyone feels that the product is a collaborative effort. This is huge for morale, motivation, and maintaining a positive rapport between designers & the rest of the crew. Basically, make the process participatory = stoked crew.
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[...] Six secrets: design lessons and shoelace knots Posted in designers, graphic design, methodology, user research by Dan on November 18, 2009 Picking up from yesterday’s topic, Jeffrey Kalmikoff, director of design and user experience at Digg, recently wrote about getting useful feedback. “If someone uses the product, they have a valid point of view – period.” In counterpoint to “When Not To Listen To Users,” you need to prompt feedback in the right way and interpret the right parts of the feedback. Here’s the post: The Anatomy of Useful Feedback [...]
[...] The anatomy of useful feedback – Jeffrey Kalmikoff, Creative Powerhouse.Great piece on the benefits of soliciting cross-disciplinary feedback throughout your process. [...]