Implementing Design Feedback
Design feedback is a crucial part of the creative process, allowing designers to refine and improve their work. However, implementing feedback effectively can be challenging. This guide will explore some practices for incorporating design feedback into your workflow.
1. Understand the Feedback
An easy trap to fall into is accepting feedback without properly understanding it. Clarify ambiguous points before deciding what to do, asking for specific examples if needed. When possible, try to understand the reason for the given feedback as well, sometimes suggestions may be given due to confusion or a misunderstanding of a product or feature. Ensuring you understand the feedback fully before moving forward ensures that you’re working on the right things, for the right reasons.
2. Prioritize Feedback
Not all feedback is equally important. Prioritizing the feedback you receive allows your team to focus on the right kinds of feedback at the right stage of the process. Some options for prioritization include:
- Project goals and objectives
- User needs and preferences
- Technical constraints
- Time and resource limitations
3. Create an Action Plan
Once the incoming feedback is understood and prioritized it’s time to make a plan on how you’re going to tackle it. Often times input and feedback is can come in large requests, breaking those down into smaller more manageable tasks allows the team to work through changes one at a time.
It’s also important to set realistic deadlines for the work, users and stakeholders both want their changes the moment they request them. If you’ve properly prioritized the work you should be able to provide a general roadmap of how and when the feedback will be addressed.
4. Implement Changes Iteratively
Along with creating smaller tasks, it’s critical to implement these changes iteratively. When working through changes teams should test and review the changes regularly. Implementing one high-priority change may reduce or remove the need for other lower priority changes. Alternatively, changing part of an interface or flow may cause different issues to arise which may need to be reviewed and prioritized ahead of other feedback. A cycle of iteration and review ensures that teams are consistently improving the experience and moving towards user satisfaction.
5. Document Your Process
While it may feel obvious what you’re working on to you and your team, stakeholders and users may not be aware of every direction or decision. Ensure that you note decisions around which feedback has been implemented and why the decision was made, if similar feedback comes up in the future you’ll be able to reference past decisions on how or why you moved in the direction you did.
Any new challenges, issues, or insights gained through iteration and feedback should also be documented for reference later. The team may want to pursue a bit of feedback, but is not equipped with the resources or skills today, documenting these challenges allows conversations to take place around how to best approach these ideas moving forward.
7. Reflect and Learn
Use the feedback process as a learning opportunity:
- Analyze what worked well and what didn’t
- Identify patterns in the feedback received
- Apply lessons learned to future design processes
The feedback process does not end when changes have been made or features ship. After work is completed the team should analyze what worked well about the current process and what can be improved in the future.
When collecting and working through feedback the team should also strive to identify any patterns that begin to establish. Common threads can be pulled to dig deeper and get to root problems or opportunities for improvements. If multiple pieces of feedback come through on the same or related issues it may also be a sign that the issue should be shifted up in priority as it’s causing enough of a problem to be reported multiple times.
Implementing design feedback effectively is a skill that improves with practice. By following these steps and maintaining open communication, designers can create more refined, user-centered designs that meet business goals and user needs.