Digging into user feedback
Oftentimes, when we receive feedback related to a user’s experience or an existing design, we’re already equipped with assumptions, concerns, goals and questions we want answered. In addition to these goals, it’s most important to understand the users’ needs as a human, as if we were in their exact shoes (or bare feet, etc.) for the experience in question.
“[A lot of people] don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”
– Steve Jobs
It comes back to that magical word that puts my heart at ease – empathy. In order to understand potential problems, some of the “broadness” can be captured by focusing deeper on:
- What precedes the user’s situation?
- Where is the user aiming to get to?
- What are the user’s goals?
- How does the user feel, and what’s the story behind those feelings?
- What environment or context is the user in? / How do things work around them?
There’s no one size fits all set of questions, it’s up to us to guide the conversation towards filling in the details.
For example, I was able to learn more context and detail on one user feedback by inquiring deeper on another:
I asked an interviewee how they account for tasks they need to work on, and they talked about listing their to-do’s and due dates in a Google doc. Later, they mentioned it was important to deliver tasks on time and only when I asked about how they ensure to do tasks on time, did it surface that the previously mentioned document is formatted as a calendar (because it helped them to add tasks and reference them later for a specific date) and each tasks includes hyperlinks to relevant documents.
In the spirit of gaining understanding, it is valuable to consider our colleagues that are in frequent conversation with users (where detailed and solution focused feedback can come up) or have been the users themselves: Customer Success Managers, Engineers, Salespeople and many more. Caution is needed to not passively accept personal opinions, instead focus on the user’s job to be done and seeing how new feedback fits into the user journey that’s been identified so far.
Curiosity may have killed the cat (super sad), but it also helps humans design valuable experiences (super awesome) – keep digging!
