How to get feedback from the customer on the case and in time
A few months ago, Michael Hawley published an article on www.uxmatters.com devoted to solving common problems encountered by interface designers who expect to receive clear comments from the customer on interface prototypes.
This article may be helpful:
* designers ui / ux;
* designers;
* project managers from the executor.
I present to you her translation:
')
“Consider this scenario:
You are the leader of the usability team working on the project. After completing the stage of business analysis and examining users, you have brainstormed and several meetings to generate ideas. After that, you (or your employees - hereinafter my reference) begin to develop prototypes of basic interface solutions and are ready to introduce the customer to them. The project has a tight schedule, but you understand how important it is to give customers time to review your concepts so that they have the opportunity to give the necessary comments. By following the plan, you are giving a presentation on Tuesday morning.
Finally, you say: “Send your comments by Thursday evening,” and, pleased, complete the presentation.
It seems that the customer representatives found the concepts and ideas embodied in the prototypes interesting. Now you expect valuable comments from them - for example, about how the presented concept agrees with the business goals of the customer, whether there are any requirements that are not taken into account or that there are any problems in the workflow or navigation.
On Thursday evening, you open a letter from the customer, but you don’t find anything you’d expect from him. There are few comments, and even those about such things as the size of the logo, the text of the signatures to the forms and elements, or wishes to change the color of individual blocks. You start to worry that, perhaps, on the other side they do not understand how important it is to take a critical look at the submitted materials and that the lack of comments now can cause problems in the next stages of development. The time allotted for comments is over and, if you ask for details, the project runs the risk of breaking the schedule. You start to get nervous. What went wrong?
The importance of getting feedback from the customer.
It all started right. Developing a shared vision and supporting it by all parties is the key to success for most projects. So, contacting the customer for comments, you did the right thing.
Ux-specialists often have concerns about whether to involve all interested parties in the discussion at the early stages of development. where they might just start to express their thoughts about what they would like to add to the design (something like what we saw in the answer in the first scenario) . But by asking the right questions, you can avoid unnecessary comments, but, on the contrary, you can receive valuable recommendations from businesses and developers on what is important to improve now, at an early stage of the design process.
I found that feedback works better when you have the opportunity to present your design ideas, give the customer time to review them in more detail, in order to more fully understand your proposed solutions and concepts. This will require the inclusion of additional time in the project schedule, but the opportunity to give the customer a thoughtful understanding of the details of your concept, to bring other employees to the discussion is worth it. In addition, the establishment of limited deadlines for receiving feedback is useful for project management and helps to save the run-up of a project without knocking down deadlines .
The error occurred when the ui-lid asked simply “send me your comments by Thursday evening”.
This simple request reflects many assumptions about the customer's knowledge of what is interface design, what should be addressed in the prototype and what issues are resolved at this stage. This is a common mistake of ux-developers, arising from the fact that they themselves cook all the time in the design process and have long known the answers to all these questions. The designers themselves understand how to ensure the correct assessment of the concepts and know what should be evaluated at what stage of the design. And since customers always have something to say about design, designers often assume (often unconsciously) that customer representatives are able to correctly evaluate critical aspects of design by providing constructive feedback that would help improve the design. Sometimes this assumption carries no danger. But not always.
5 steps to improve the quality of feedback
There are a few simple steps that can help improve the quality of feedback and get those comments that will be helpful.
1. Define the context. In my experience, often the reason that comments do not carry anything useful for designers is their lack of time - they are not relevant at this stage of the design process, although they could have value at another point. This is especially true in the early stages, when the team must focus on developing the project paradigm itself, high-level solutions and the overall infrastructure. And the author of comments is not always to blame; on the contrary, he often simply doesn’t know that low detailed prototypes are presented to him now, because he doesn’t know what is being done and when in the design process and therefore does not understand at what stage he can work on what changes team.
You can solve this problem by explaining what the current stage of development is and what kind of comments are most relevant at this stage.
Presented in Fig. 1 scheme will help to visually show what is happening at the current stage of development and will help determine the list of topics for discussion:
Look at Yandex. Photos
Fig. 1 - What comments are needed at what stages of interface development
2. Ask specific questions. Provide examples of helpful and meaningless answers.
Open questions like “send me your comments by the end of Thursday” may seem like a good opportunity to get more answers to a larger range of questions, but in reality they usually have the opposite effect - there are not enough comments and they are not about that.
Given the time constraints that exist in projects and the possibility of a broad interpretation of “free-form comments”, I find it much more useful to list certain key questions and point out which places in the concept / prototype should be commented. By asking specific questions or simply focusing on specific areas for which you now need comments, and setting the format for answers, you give the customer a guide to ensure that they first receive the comments necessary to reach a common understanding on key issues. Here are some sample questions:
- Does the proposed business objectives of the project? Why? / Why not?
- Please comment on the proposed process of the transaction (or other important action)
- Is there anything in the proposed concept that may require more resources to develop than planned?
- Is there something in the proposed concept that needs to be verified from a legal point of view?
Do not overload the customer representatives with too many questions.
3-5 basic questions will help them better focus on the answers. In addition, the wording of your questions will be able to help in creating a general impression of the presented concept. And this will help build answers to other questions and provide an opportunity to highlight the main considerations about your concept.
3. Allow the customer to comment on important details as a separate item.
Although the designer risks being disappointed by receiving comments about the design details, such as the color of the elements or line spacing, they can still be useful - it is important to give the customer the opportunity to focus on those details that are important to him.
Therefore, you should include in the feedback format you propose, in addition to the key questions, the opportunity to make any other comments and observations on your prototype. This can be triggered by a simple question “Do you have any other comments?” This will give the customer a channel for presenting this kind of information and, on the other hand, will help focus more attention on the key issues that are important at the current stage.
4. Present general instructions for answering questions and examples “Good answer / Bad question”.
One of the most frequent disappointments of the designer is the situation where the customer gives comments in the style “Make everything one color”, instead of describing the problem itself, which should be described as “Too many colors make it difficult to perceive the information.” But this form of response is not the person's responsibility. Often, customers do not understand the role of designers in solving design problems and simply try to help in this way.
On the other hand, the designer will be unhappy and if the comments turn out to be insufficiently developed. An unnecessarily critical tone of comments can also cause aversion - they say, the customer does not understand the role of design and tries to sit in the designer’s / designer’s chair.
The best way to avoid such situations is to give the customer clear instructions. The instructions should be short and to the point, general enough to avoid being biased towards them and, where necessary, include examples.
Here are some examples of such instructions:
- Be honest. Do not worry about my feelings - if you see something that needs comments, it is better to say now than later.
- It is not enough just to say “Good” or “Bad”. Ask why. For example:
- Not a useful comment: “This is awesome!“
- Useful: “Placing controls next to graphs makes it easier to understand how they work.”
- Not useful: “Too heavy ”
- Useful: “There is too much advertising on the page because of which it is difficult to focus on our key message”
- Describe the problem, not the solution. There may be several solutions, and together we can find more options. For example:
- Not helpful: “Replace color with red”
- Useful: “I find it difficult to read the text on this background”
- Not helpful: “Move navigation up”
- Useful: “I find it difficult to understand where you are in the app”
5. Make it easy to comment. Customers are busy people. Save them time.
In my experience, most customers would prefer the magic usabilityist to read their thoughts and find the answers there without spending time on their part. Since we do not know how, we should receive comments, taking care of the time of customers.
Steps 1-4 describe a series of questions and instructions that need to be included in a comment request. But the request itself should not be a lengthy multi-page document containing many instructions and questions. Keep it short, ask essentially to read it anyway. To form a request, you can use one of the following methods:
- Online survey will provide very accurate instructions, ask clear questions. Comments are collected consistently in them, and it is easy to work with them, avoiding a multitude of comments scattered across several email topics.
But this option will require customization and may be inconvenient for the customer.
- Services of interactive commenting are more convenient, but also not without their drawbacks (for those who work with Russian-speaking customers, the main disadvantage will be the language of services) . The article “ 21 Resources for Getting Design Feedback ” presents a number of similar services of various configurations.
- E-mail is the easiest option - after all, customers use e-mail most often, and most likely this is the most convenient and familiar option for them. A simple, brief letter with your key questions and clear instructions will allow you to avoid most of the problems starting with the words “send me your comments by Thursday evening” (but there are a number of possible problems here too - see glebkalinin.ru/rethink-email ) .
Conclusion
The effectiveness of designer collaboration with customers and other interested parties is an important component of the success of any project. Customers can bring their vision of the project, their opinion can help designers to understand the space of the design task and the areas of developing solutions that are consistent with the business goals and planned implementation technologies. But an ill-conceived appeal to the customer for comments can lead to problems in communication and violation of expectations. Thoughtfully approaching how to ask your questions and providing simple questions and instructions, you can identify potential risks at the beginning of the design process, minimize stress, meet deadlines and ultimately offer a better interface solution. "
This article may be helpful:
* designers ui / ux;
* designers;
* project managers from the executor.
I present to you her translation:
')
“Consider this scenario:
You are the leader of the usability team working on the project. After completing the stage of business analysis and examining users, you have brainstormed and several meetings to generate ideas. After that, you (or your employees - hereinafter my reference) begin to develop prototypes of basic interface solutions and are ready to introduce the customer to them. The project has a tight schedule, but you understand how important it is to give customers time to review your concepts so that they have the opportunity to give the necessary comments. By following the plan, you are giving a presentation on Tuesday morning.
Finally, you say: “Send your comments by Thursday evening,” and, pleased, complete the presentation.
It seems that the customer representatives found the concepts and ideas embodied in the prototypes interesting. Now you expect valuable comments from them - for example, about how the presented concept agrees with the business goals of the customer, whether there are any requirements that are not taken into account or that there are any problems in the workflow or navigation.
On Thursday evening, you open a letter from the customer, but you don’t find anything you’d expect from him. There are few comments, and even those about such things as the size of the logo, the text of the signatures to the forms and elements, or wishes to change the color of individual blocks. You start to worry that, perhaps, on the other side they do not understand how important it is to take a critical look at the submitted materials and that the lack of comments now can cause problems in the next stages of development. The time allotted for comments is over and, if you ask for details, the project runs the risk of breaking the schedule. You start to get nervous. What went wrong?
The importance of getting feedback from the customer.
It all started right. Developing a shared vision and supporting it by all parties is the key to success for most projects. So, contacting the customer for comments, you did the right thing.
Ux-specialists often have concerns about whether to involve all interested parties in the discussion at the early stages of development. where they might just start to express their thoughts about what they would like to add to the design (something like what we saw in the answer in the first scenario) . But by asking the right questions, you can avoid unnecessary comments, but, on the contrary, you can receive valuable recommendations from businesses and developers on what is important to improve now, at an early stage of the design process.
I found that feedback works better when you have the opportunity to present your design ideas, give the customer time to review them in more detail, in order to more fully understand your proposed solutions and concepts. This will require the inclusion of additional time in the project schedule, but the opportunity to give the customer a thoughtful understanding of the details of your concept, to bring other employees to the discussion is worth it. In addition, the establishment of limited deadlines for receiving feedback is useful for project management and helps to save the run-up of a project without knocking down deadlines .
The error occurred when the ui-lid asked simply “send me your comments by Thursday evening”.
This simple request reflects many assumptions about the customer's knowledge of what is interface design, what should be addressed in the prototype and what issues are resolved at this stage. This is a common mistake of ux-developers, arising from the fact that they themselves cook all the time in the design process and have long known the answers to all these questions. The designers themselves understand how to ensure the correct assessment of the concepts and know what should be evaluated at what stage of the design. And since customers always have something to say about design, designers often assume (often unconsciously) that customer representatives are able to correctly evaluate critical aspects of design by providing constructive feedback that would help improve the design. Sometimes this assumption carries no danger. But not always.
5 steps to improve the quality of feedback
There are a few simple steps that can help improve the quality of feedback and get those comments that will be helpful.
1. Define the context. In my experience, often the reason that comments do not carry anything useful for designers is their lack of time - they are not relevant at this stage of the design process, although they could have value at another point. This is especially true in the early stages, when the team must focus on developing the project paradigm itself, high-level solutions and the overall infrastructure. And the author of comments is not always to blame; on the contrary, he often simply doesn’t know that low detailed prototypes are presented to him now, because he doesn’t know what is being done and when in the design process and therefore does not understand at what stage he can work on what changes team.
You can solve this problem by explaining what the current stage of development is and what kind of comments are most relevant at this stage.
Presented in Fig. 1 scheme will help to visually show what is happening at the current stage of development and will help determine the list of topics for discussion:
Look at Yandex. Photos
Fig. 1 - What comments are needed at what stages of interface development
2. Ask specific questions. Provide examples of helpful and meaningless answers.
Open questions like “send me your comments by the end of Thursday” may seem like a good opportunity to get more answers to a larger range of questions, but in reality they usually have the opposite effect - there are not enough comments and they are not about that.
Given the time constraints that exist in projects and the possibility of a broad interpretation of “free-form comments”, I find it much more useful to list certain key questions and point out which places in the concept / prototype should be commented. By asking specific questions or simply focusing on specific areas for which you now need comments, and setting the format for answers, you give the customer a guide to ensure that they first receive the comments necessary to reach a common understanding on key issues. Here are some sample questions:
- Does the proposed business objectives of the project? Why? / Why not?
- Please comment on the proposed process of the transaction (or other important action)
- Is there anything in the proposed concept that may require more resources to develop than planned?
- Is there something in the proposed concept that needs to be verified from a legal point of view?
Do not overload the customer representatives with too many questions.
3-5 basic questions will help them better focus on the answers. In addition, the wording of your questions will be able to help in creating a general impression of the presented concept. And this will help build answers to other questions and provide an opportunity to highlight the main considerations about your concept.
3. Allow the customer to comment on important details as a separate item.
Although the designer risks being disappointed by receiving comments about the design details, such as the color of the elements or line spacing, they can still be useful - it is important to give the customer the opportunity to focus on those details that are important to him.
Therefore, you should include in the feedback format you propose, in addition to the key questions, the opportunity to make any other comments and observations on your prototype. This can be triggered by a simple question “Do you have any other comments?” This will give the customer a channel for presenting this kind of information and, on the other hand, will help focus more attention on the key issues that are important at the current stage.
4. Present general instructions for answering questions and examples “Good answer / Bad question”.
One of the most frequent disappointments of the designer is the situation where the customer gives comments in the style “Make everything one color”, instead of describing the problem itself, which should be described as “Too many colors make it difficult to perceive the information.” But this form of response is not the person's responsibility. Often, customers do not understand the role of designers in solving design problems and simply try to help in this way.
On the other hand, the designer will be unhappy and if the comments turn out to be insufficiently developed. An unnecessarily critical tone of comments can also cause aversion - they say, the customer does not understand the role of design and tries to sit in the designer’s / designer’s chair.
The best way to avoid such situations is to give the customer clear instructions. The instructions should be short and to the point, general enough to avoid being biased towards them and, where necessary, include examples.
Here are some examples of such instructions:
- Be honest. Do not worry about my feelings - if you see something that needs comments, it is better to say now than later.
- It is not enough just to say “Good” or “Bad”. Ask why. For example:
- Not a useful comment: “This is awesome!“
- Useful: “Placing controls next to graphs makes it easier to understand how they work.”
- Not useful: “Too heavy ”
- Useful: “There is too much advertising on the page because of which it is difficult to focus on our key message”
- Describe the problem, not the solution. There may be several solutions, and together we can find more options. For example:
- Not helpful: “Replace color with red”
- Useful: “I find it difficult to read the text on this background”
- Not helpful: “Move navigation up”
- Useful: “I find it difficult to understand where you are in the app”
5. Make it easy to comment. Customers are busy people. Save them time.
In my experience, most customers would prefer the magic usabilityist to read their thoughts and find the answers there without spending time on their part. Since we do not know how, we should receive comments, taking care of the time of customers.
Steps 1-4 describe a series of questions and instructions that need to be included in a comment request. But the request itself should not be a lengthy multi-page document containing many instructions and questions. Keep it short, ask essentially to read it anyway. To form a request, you can use one of the following methods:
- Online survey will provide very accurate instructions, ask clear questions. Comments are collected consistently in them, and it is easy to work with them, avoiding a multitude of comments scattered across several email topics.
But this option will require customization and may be inconvenient for the customer.
- Services of interactive commenting are more convenient, but also not without their drawbacks (for those who work with Russian-speaking customers, the main disadvantage will be the language of services) . The article “ 21 Resources for Getting Design Feedback ” presents a number of similar services of various configurations.
- E-mail is the easiest option - after all, customers use e-mail most often, and most likely this is the most convenient and familiar option for them. A simple, brief letter with your key questions and clear instructions will allow you to avoid most of the problems starting with the words “send me your comments by Thursday evening” (but there are a number of possible problems here too - see glebkalinin.ru/rethink-email ) .
Conclusion
The effectiveness of designer collaboration with customers and other interested parties is an important component of the success of any project. Customers can bring their vision of the project, their opinion can help designers to understand the space of the design task and the areas of developing solutions that are consistent with the business goals and planned implementation technologies. But an ill-conceived appeal to the customer for comments can lead to problems in communication and violation of expectations. Thoughtfully approaching how to ask your questions and providing simple questions and instructions, you can identify potential risks at the beginning of the design process, minimize stress, meet deadlines and ultimately offer a better interface solution. "
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/132287/
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