Getting unstuck: UX/UI feedback sessions
I frequently want to gather quick constructive input from my team, colleagues, stakeholders, or users about the design I am working with or something else that`s on my table. But if you ask people to give feedback on something, usually this feedback does not help for a relatively simple reason. It is not constructive. This problem always bugged me whenever I facilitated feedback sessions, where all I wanted to do is get input about my work, so I tried to figure out how to make these types of meetings more productive and constructive.
Feedback sessions
I regularly look for input from other people whenever I create a new design, write a lengthy report, make a presentation or whatever else it might be. Because I believe it is essential for someone else to view your work before releasing it in nature. It allows you to look at your work from different perspective and challenges you to learn whenever the other person asks why you have done something in that particular way.
When I started my career as a user experience designer, I have routinely facilitated meetings that I call “Feedback sessions”. First few dozen times, these feedback sessions were straightforward. It was me screen-sharing my desktop where I had my work open, and took notes about what others have said about my work. But pretty quickly I realized that a lot of times I had not heard something crucial that somebody has mentioned while I was taking a note. So I needed a better way how to do these sessions.
Shared files & prototypes
One idea that was not anything new was to share the work and allow people to leave comments, similarly, how it is with shared google docs or adobe prototypes. I quickly realized that this approach works fine for some cases, especially if I have to collaborate with someone. But it does not work as good when I want to receive feedback about the work and act on it. It is not that the comments left on the shared file are not relevant; they don’t explain why people have thought in one way or another in most cases. And another thing worth mentioning is that when there are many tasks on my table, seeing feedback flowing in the e-mail sometimes creates unnecessary stress and distracts me.
Feedback sessions 2.0
I came across the “Start-Stop-Continue Retrospective” canvas in one of the meetings facilitated by a colleague of mine. And it gave me an idea. What if I merged this canvas with “Burger feedback” method and made other people give me feedback in a somewhat constructive way.
So I got to work and shortly after created template which consists of four elements; stage, like, question and don’t like.
Stage
It could be either physical space or digital space. For example, it could be a meeting room with a big wall, table, interactive screen, or you can utilize digital and physical spaces together and get the best out of both worlds. Ultimately, this is the place that allows people to get to know your work. Where you set it up is up to you. But don`t forget to make it a fun experience.
Like
Here is where all the feedback gathering starts. I typically ask people to start by asking them a simple question, what do they like about my work. It is easier for some people to come up with things they like about the work I am presenting, but people struggle with this in several cases. So if you decide to run a feedback session like this, don`t feel discouraged if people struggle with saying something good about your work, that`s a good indicator.
Question
After “Like” part, people have gathered some knowledge about the work I am presenting, and now I can get to the meat. At this stage, I ask people to write questions about things they don`t understand, want to know more about, would like me to explain etc. People usually generate many questions at this stage if the “Like” part was not very productive. After questions are written down, I categorize them if I see many questions with a similar underlying theme. However, it is not obligatory to do that.
Don`t like
At this stage, the last step for a feedback session, I ask people to write what they don`t like. Depending on how smooth was the previous parts of the feedback session, I will either get many things that people don`t like or a small number of notes. Also, I don`t bluntly ask people to write what they don`t like but to write why they don`t like it. For example “I don`t like [lack of whitespace] because [it makes it hard to read terms and conditions]”
Conclusion
I have used this type of feedback gathering on many occasions. Mostly to gather feedback about things that can have many subjective opinions like a design, for example. I have also used this method in conjunction with other methods when facilitating workshops where I need people to give each other feedback. I know that there are many different ways to do this and it would be keen to learn those!
Also, a couple of times, I have failed using this method. It was mainly my fault by not setting up the right expectations before the activity, inexperience with facilitating or not explaining the purpose well enough. We all start somewhere, and failing is just a part of the journey!
