Sprint Day 5 — Accepting Feedback and Understanding People
I’m still in high school. One of my most visited websites is my school’s online report card portal. I worry about my GPA, my AP and PSAT/SAT/ACT scores, what college I’m going to get into, you know, high school things.
One of my school’s main values is ensuring a consistent and healthy feedback loop between the students and faculty. It’s common to receive sometimes pages of comments and responses from my English teacher on my term paper, or from my history teacher on the document-based-essay. This approach can be overwhelming at first, but after acclimatizing to receiving this type of feedback, I now look forward to the grade and comments, not dread them with post-submission regrets.
This feedback loop approach to education is what got me so excited for the testing and validation day of ReadyTalk’s first 5-Day Design Sprint.
Relative to the fast-paced, rapid decision making mindset of the beginning of the week, it was certainly a welcomed change of pace to the sprint. The feedback and testing day was the core evaluation of the progress we made throughout the week. Prototype in (digital) hand, our interviewer separated from the rest of the group and the sprint room established one-way audio/video communications in accordance with the book’s suggestions. This uni-directional nature enabled some interesting conversations and insights in the sprint room, some I don’t think that would have surfaced in discussion had it not for this self-imposed restriction. Often times I was genuinely surprised that certain characteristics of the prototype that I had believed to be useful and practical were actually quite the contrary. Indeed, Friday provided me with both the eye-opening insight and the constructive criticism to feel productive and successful.
The sprint book is also explicit in the structure and format of the interviews. The distinctly different system for evaluating how a prototype performs made out my initial impressions to be quite un-natural. Rather than direct the interviewee where to go, what to click, etc., the interviewer directed commands in the form of questions that prompted answers. For instance, instead of this: “Click that link there.” The conversation was more similar to this structure: “Do you want to click there?” or “Why do you want to click there?” At first, this journey based interview style was lethargic and perhaps a little bulky — I wanted to see the user actually use the prototype, not talk about it. Yet retroactively, I understand how this approach aligns with the core design thinking principle of human empathy. It is a fallacy to assume that true understanding of one’s thoughts and perspectives can be garnered through explicit commands and absolute direction.
If you want you know more about the interviewer’s perspective check out Sprint Day Five — The Interviewer
Inevitably, the new insights we were gaining were going to get forgotten, so the team was also tasked with documenting and taking notes on the interviews. We were writing down insights and comments on sticky notes and describing with either a positive or negative symbol. All of them were placed at the same time on to one of six categories related to our prototype on the white board. I certainly see the applications and usefulness of an effective sprint note-taking system, but the sheer quantity of sticky notes on the board and lack of clear organizational structure made it challenging to execute and evaluate decisions and next-steps based off of them. This fundamental challenge extended post-interview as well. After completing the interviews, our attempt to organize and categorize our notes left potentially significant insights quietly on the board while the team debated others in our evaluation discussion concluding the sprint. It is in the document first, organize and synthesize later approach that laid the only major misstep in the execution of the day’s goals.
Holistically, Friday was a critical day for my personal vindication as well as the vindication of our prototype. Perhaps more importantly, however, it epitomizes the design thinking principle of a human/user centric perspective. Friday embodies that the challenge of effective products lies as much as it does in qualitative feeling and thoughts as it does looks and glamour. Ultimately, it is through this lens that the true and genuine value of Friday’s quirks can shine.
Now while I’ll still be toiling away at English, Chinese, physics, chemistry and math for another three years until my graduation in 2019, I’ll be looking forward to all the feedback I get along the way — whether it be in school, in work — or in life.
