Listen, Learn, Reflect: How to gather community feedback for your design project

Creating surveys, interviews, & focus groups

In architecture school, so much of our design work was carried out without a real client or real users in mind. Without hearing from the people who would inhabit a project, I often found myself flailing for something to hold on to. When I graduated and moved into professional practice, I was eager to learn from clients and users, but I had to gain those communication skills in the field. In design studio, I was certainly never taught the primary skill that a designer should bring to the initial research phase of a project: listening.

Before you put pencil to paper, you’ll need to understand the people your project will serve. Surveys, interviews, and focus groups are all tools to help you connect to the wants, needs, stories, vision, and goals of clients and users. Following are some ideas I’ve learned from professional practice:

General Thoughts

Offer multiple points of entry: Your users are not a monolith — they are a diverse array of people who may have radically different backgrounds and interests. Similarly, it’s likely that your users may want to engage with your questions in different ways; this may be due to age, literacy, education, access to technology, or any number of other factors. It’s best to offer multiple points of entry: for example, writing and speaking, large group and small group, immediate responses and delayed response. For example, when leading an elementary school workshop, we offer a time for children to raise their hand and share ideas, a time to write down ideas on paper, and a time to speak to us one-on-one or in small groups.

Lead with empathy: A wise designer once told me, “Always remember, you are not the user.” You are here to serve the user, and that begins by listening carefully to understand the experiences and perspectives of others. By stepping into another person’s shoes, you can leave behind preconceived notions and discover new and creative ideas.

Appreciate the value of lived experience: You may be bringing expertise from your education or your professional experience as a designer, but you must appreciate and acknowledge the value of lived experience that your users and clients bring to the table. Their first-hand narratives and ideas will help shape your design work. Remember, you aren’t solving problems for your users; you are solving them together.

State the benefit: The people participating in your survey or interview are spending their valuable time with you. Right off the bat, you should acknowledge how the work you are doing is aiming to benefit them. They will be more likely to spend time with you and appreciate your work if you can clearly show what your collaboration will do for them.

1. Surveys

A survey is a list of questions that you disseminate to a group of clients or users. Surveys work best for large groups, for when you’d like to grant the respondents anonymity, or for when you’re hoping to solicit fairly straightforward feedback.

Keep it short: For online surveys where we are attempting to solicit feedback from large groups, I try to keep surveys to ten questions or less.

Consider demographic questions carefully: You may automatically put questions about age, gender, race, or education at the top of your survey, but think carefully before you do. These questions may make your users uncomfortable and less likely to answer the really crucial questions further down in your survey. Make sure you really need this information to meet your design goals.

Ask one question at a time: Don’t ask multi-part questions like “How do you want your space to look and how do you want it to function?” People are likely to only answer one part of that question, and they will avoid the part they are unsure of. Split it into easy-to-answer questions. New survey platforms like Typeform show only one question at a time, avoiding overloading the user with a flood of text and allowing for a slower and more measured reveal of your questions.

Keep it conversational: I left design school with a lot of jargon in my daily vocabulary, and that language (I once told my friend we wanted to ‘activate the ground plane,’ which I later explained meant ‘put something on the ground’) can be alienating and frustrating. Choose language that is friendly, open, and easy to understand. Make sure to test out your survey with outsiders to see how the language sounds.

It’s all in how you ask: If you end your survey by asking, “Do you have any suggestions for the location of the monument?”, you’re likely to not get an answer. They will say no and happily end the survey. Think instead of asking more specific questions, like “What are some places that would be good locations for this monument?” Instead of asking, “

Consider multiple languages: Think carefully about language accessibility. While it’s not always possible to translate an in-person session, surveys allow us to refine our language before sending them out. Research the languages spoken by your participants and the communities and do your best to provide translations.

2. Interviews

An interview is a focused question and answer session. Interviews work best for groups of five or less, allowing each individual person to get plenty of time and focus.

Define a goal: Make sure you know what your goal in the interview session will be. Are you trying to define the design problem? Show them some possible design schemes? At the beginning of the meeting, clearly state the purpose of the interview.

Capture carefully: If possible, record the meeting, and make sure to ask for permission first. If it’s not possible, do your best to write down words and phrases that the interviewee says verbatim. If you are only writing down your interpretation or your synopsis, you may be missing what they are actually telling you.

Ask thoughtful questions: Don’t ask questions that can be easily answered with a web search. Don’t ask yes or no questions; instead choose open-ended questions that will yield more information and stories. Don’t ask leading questions that have your opinion or an assumption already embedded. Demonstrate that you have spent time researching your clients and users. Plan a concise list of questions that you can reasonably go through in your scheduled time, but allow some flexibility to ask thoughtful follow-up questions when the need arises. Explore new paths as they emerge in conversation.

Send a preview: Before the interview, send over a list of questions and a meeting agenda; this should be no longer than a single side of a page. Make sure the clients know the interview setup, schedule, and who will be participating in the meeting.

3. Focus Groups & Group Interviews

While an interview is typically a question and answer session, a focus group uses activities and shorter conversations. Focus groups work well with more than five subjects, and while you may not go as deeply into stories and ideas, you’ll be able to capture a wider cross-section of opinions and thoughts. One benefit of large group feedback is that the community shares ideas and hears dissenting opinions; this might result in an added benefit of community-building and build dialogue between different voices.

Multiple modes: As mentioned above, give the participants a few different ways to engage with your questions, perhaps some that are written and some that are spoken. Make sure you are allowing the more reserved participants to have their opinion shared. Open questions are often answered by the loudest voices, but by using direct questions, one-on-ones, or sketch/writing activities, you can make sure other voices are heard.

Focus on the feel: As a designer, it’s your job to identify design problems and work to solve them. It isn’t your focus group’s job to solve the design problem, but to offer up their dreams, feelings, vision, needs, and wants. For example, our firm does a lot of design work to reimagine public school cafeterias. When we ask sixth graders what they want in their cafeteria, they often tell us they want big screens and video games. But, as the designers, we know that’s not financially or practically feasible, and that other users, like teachers and other student groups, might not agree at all. What the students might be telling us is that they want their cafeterias to be fun and vivid spaces. A better question might be: How do you want to feel when you walk into the cafeteria? What is working well in your cafeteria? These open-ended questions show the values and vision for the space, then it’s our job to figure out how to use design elements to produce them.

Alternate Activities: Focus groups may be question and answer style, as described above, but you might also be able to learn about your users through alternate activities.

• Print out a set of images for participants to react to. For example, we made a deck of cards showing evocative images of a range of places, like a modern art gallery, a crowded vintage bookstore, and a bustling coffee shop, and we asked users how they wanted their new space to feel and function. You can include images of nature, objects, and other items to spark abstract conversations.
• Using online services like Mentimeter, you can create a real-time word cloud as participants answer questions on their devices. The most popular answers grow bigger, allowing you to quickly consolidate ideas from a large group.

4. Reflect

At the end of this process, it’s important to reflect what you learned back to the participants and to show them what you plan to do with their ideas. I’ve worked in a lot of communities that feel that they are exploited by designers who come to visit, ask their ideas, and then….nothing ever happens.

Reflect their words back: Show that you listened. Create easy-to-read documents and diagrams to illustrate the individual ideas and consolidated feedback you received. You can pull out and highlight the most interesting and important quotations you recorded, or you can compile varied responses into word clouds.

Show how their opinions will influence the project: Next, show how the specific words you heard will influence the design process. For example, you can show how the different ideas you heard will lead to distinct design values that you will use to guide the project (i.e. You told me you wanted the lobby to be an active space where people can work together > Collaboration will be one of our guiding principles).

Thank you: Lastly, always follow up with a thank you note to show that you appreciate the time that the participants spent with you. The ideas you have been given have tremendous value, and you should make sure to show how meaningful this process has been.