Welcome to better design feedback!

This is a free course for designers, engineers, product people.

We all know we should solicit feedback. But sometimes it can feel hard.

This course came about as I was hanging out with a bunch of designers from Automattic. As we were talking throughout the week at a meetup, ways to solicit feedback kept coming up over and over again.

I thought wouldn’t it be neat to come up with a comprehensive resource that I could share?

The obvious disclaimer is that this is not all encompassing.

But these are some of the things that I’ve picked up over the past 20 plus years as a product designer.

I hope you enjoy this resource!

If you do, please consider sharing it with others.

And please let me know what you think. I’d love to hear your feedback and your thoughts.

Thanks!

If I had to boil this course down to a single phrase, it’s:

Be curious.

As the designer. You don’t just design pretty things.

You’re like good scientist, always experimenting and searching for new ideas.

You’re like a psychologist, understanding how people think, act, and feel.

You’re like an Explorer discovering new ways to solve problems.

You’re like an artist, creating beautiful and meaningful designs.

And you’re like an engineer building things that work well and last a long time.

In this course, I will encourage you to blend all of these roles.

If you find yourself resisting something, I’d encourage you to take the time to take a closer look and figure out why. Is it fear of the unknown? Is it your ego or pride?

I’ve found that an easy antidote to all of that is to simply let your curiosity guide you.

Before we get into all of the many ways that you can solicit feedback. Let’s first talk about your gut.

I’m a firm believer that your gut really matters.

Probably more so than our industry likes to admit.

But what is your gut? It’s a combination of the experience and insights you’ve picked up over the years, combined with intuition.

If there was a spectrum with gut driven on one side and data-driven on the other and a line right down the middle, my guess is that the best designers tend to lean towards the gut driven side of things.

But you can’t be 100% gut driven.

The shorthand I often use for this is “gut driven, but data informed”.

I’ve worked with many junior and senior designers over the years and I’ll share a common pattern that I’ve seen over and over.

Junior designers by necessity tend to be very open to feedback.

As the designer progresses in skill and experience, there’s often a phase where they assume they don’t need any feedback. They assume that as a designer, they’ll know what’s best and their gut is all they need.

This is obviously a trap!

Unfortunately, some designers get stuck in this state forever.

Most designers eventually recognize that their ego and pride is getting in the way and eventually course-correct.

There’s a symbiosis here.

Without your gut, there would be no designs to solicit feedback.

And without feedback, you’ll never consistently take designs from bad, to good, to great.

Time to clarity is the time it takes to reach confidence that your design will work.

We can think about this across a couple of different scenarios:

So, which of these scenarios do you think will get you to clarity the fastest? It’s obviously the last one. Gathering feedback at every stage.

Every new product that you make, every new feature that you ship starts out at clarity zero.

And how do you reduce time to clarity?

Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about throughout the rest of this course.

Everyone knows that they should spend time with customers. Sadly in many tech companies, this doesn’t actually happen.

Some product companies have dedicated departments of people who communicate with customers. This has always felt like a shame to me.

Some companies, relegate customer feedback to designers. This is equally a shame in my mind.

Gathering feedback is not just the role for designers. Every role at a company can benefit from interacting with customers. You can ask them what’s working. Ask them what’s broken. You can watch them use the product and see where they’re getting stuck.

If you’re a happiness engineer, if you’re a product manager or a project manager or a program manager. If you’re an engineer. You should all be regularly interfacing with customers.

Done across multiple departments, it can create a compounding effect that has no downside… Other than needing to get over your aversion to talking to customers.

This work can pay dividends. And it benefits everyone involved, and it will help your company continually dial in your product market fit.

It’s helpful if you gather feedback at each stage of the design process:

The secret is to find ways to layer feedback in at each stage. And if you’re able to do this, then you’ll drastically increase your odds of getting to clarity.

Layering your feedback at each stage can help you get to clarity as quickly as possible.

A common pitfall that I see. Is that designers find one or two techniques that they fall in love with? And they just stick with those two techniques.

In this course, you’ll learn dozens of techniques that you can use to gather feedback. And I’d encourage you to experiment with techniques that you’ve never tried before.

I encourage you to mix and match techniques. If you can find creative ways to layer multiple techniques. You’ll be much better off and I think you’ll see a compounding effect that can drastically decrease your time to clarity.

Whenever you’re asking for feedback, it’s good to be as specific as possible about the type of feedback that you want.

This can save other people time and it can help avoid having rabbit hole discussions about things that you’re not ready to focus on yet.

Depending on the stage that you’re at with your design. You might want different types of feedback.

For instance, if you are sharing wireframes, you might just want to focus on top level feedback. Or maybe focus on the layout and avoid feedback on the copy, or the colors, or other specific details.

I’ve seen companies standardize how they talk about the level of feedback that they want. You can create templates for this to make it easier, so that everybody understands the three or four types of feedback that you might be looking for.

In this section, we’ll talk about a dozen techniques that you can use to gather customer feedback.

One of the most valuable ways that I’ve found to solicit feedback is to make a list of relevant users and just email them.

You can go about this a couple of different ways:

But the idea is to segment out the exact types of users that you want to solicit feedback from. You run a report to get their email addresses and then you send them a short email asking a specific question.

Let’s say you’re working on the stats section of your app. You might run a query, pulling 30 email addresses of active users of that part of your app. And then you just email them, asking them for feedback on a specific part of the stats section.

 Another way to solicit feedback is to ask folks who just signed up for your product. This can be a valuable source of feedback.

And it also allows you to get a better feel for who is signing up.

There are a lot of ways to go about this:

The important things to keep in mind are don’t annoy them.

And try to provide value in return.