Design feedback — Output vs Outcome
Feedback from Robin: — The last screen of loan repayment experience is feeling too bland. The user has paid in time + paid an amount higher than the installment. How about … in addition to the transaction success message + CTA (Apply For New Loan) we add some visual or congratulatory text to appreciate this gesture?. I see there’s less space to accommodate new content but I think something should be done in this regard. As they exit they should leave with a smile. What do you think of blending a smiley type thing in the illustration?…
Feedback jumping from
critique to ideas,
ideas to output,
output to do you agree-disagree,
and so on.
Sounds familiar?
Experienced or experiencing the same??
Happens every sprint???
The biggest challenge with such unstructured feedback is to make it do a smooth landing.
By smooth landing, I do not mean a correct technical or political response. Here, it means building a shared understanding.
The key to shared understanding is listening. Listening is all about catching signals from noise. And a good way to catch that is to tilt the antenna in the direction of ‘reframe the feedback’.
Now comes the question “what’s the best way to reframe”?
Before I speak about it, I want to say … neither we are the first nor the last one to have faced such a problem. Unstructured feedback is living and breathing since time immemorial. And will continue to enjoy infinite durability on earth as well as on mars after Tesla colonizes it.
As said, it is living since time immemorial. Which means there have been people who have faced the same. They have figured out a way to deal with it. Some of them were a lot wiser. They socialized their learnings via books, blogs, conferences, etc.
These learnings exist in our design world in different avatars such as user stories, hypotheses, use cases, user scenarios, etc.
Now going back to the question “what’s the best way to reframe”?. Add to it another question “how will those avatars help?”.
Demonstrating the same below.
Response to Robin’s feedback: —
Me — Robin, if I understood correctly, the outcome from the end-user perspective you are recommending is “Borrower should feel appreciated/acknowledged for a good credit behavior”. Does this user story capture the feedback correctly?.
Robin — Yup
Me — I’ve noted the ideas you suggested. I’ll think in that direction as well.
As critique or new ideas reaches our ears, mind within seconds builds a reaction. Sometimes receptive and sometimes defensive. After meeting ends, something clicks in our mind … “Whoops!, I should have thought about this thing too”.
Therefore, it’s okay to buy time for further evaluation and respond later. The least one should do as they buy more time is to close the conversation with a shared understanding.
Here, a simple user story helped navigate the conversation from output to outcome in no time. The statement “… will think in this direction as well” subtly conveyed that the proposed idea may or may not show up in iteration.
In other words, weave a response that double confirms your understanding of the problem to be solved is correct or not. Reframe using time-tested problem definition elements like user stories, scenarios, hypotheses etc.
Remember,
Listen>Hear,
Response>Reaction,
Outcome>Output.
