Constructive Criticism — Asking people for feedback
The first draft of the Planet 4 Concept is now available. This creative concept is the outcome of the surveys, individual outreach, research and interviews done in the last few months and showcases a few ideas for what Planet 4 MIGHT look like.
At this point everyone’s feedback is fundamental to help the design team refine the concept and iterate towards final Design.
Last week, the Planet 4 team had public webinar sessions to present the initial Planet 4 concepts (if you missed them, no worries, you can still watch a recorded version here). More than just presenting the first conceptual direction of Planet 4, the project team were particularly interested in immediate reactions and concerns to quickly refine ideas and incorporate suggestions on next iterations.
Besides live Q&As after each presentation (see our in-progress FAQs), we’ve launched an online survey to help you give more structured feedback. It’s only available until April 3rd, so share your thoughts NOW!
In this post, I’ll expand on our process to define our survey feedback mechanisms.
We’re using Google Forms to collect data in an action-driven survey which was sent to all participants right after the webinar. Its specific structure and flow will help measure how important the proposed concepts are and at the same time visualize which direction should be prioritized, in terms of design. The strategy to gather feedback on the first P4 concept was based on a Hypothesis-driven Development proposed by Thought Works, in which hypotheses are framed in a three-step user story like shown below:
- We believe <this capability>
- Will result in <this outcome>
- We will know we have succeeded when <we see a measurable signal>
Although this tool was originally intended to validate interactive prototypes with actual users in an A/B testing fashion, it could still be used to (in)validate concepts by combining it with a Likert-type scale to determine success. In other words, asking people to rate pieces and parts of the concepts (a.k.a. our hypotheses) on a scale of 1 to 5 will help us understand what’s most important.
“Why not use the conventional agreement/disagreement metric?” People tend to overlook such statements and just agree with them no matter what they say, as SurveyMonkey suggests in what they call acquiescence bias, whereas a feedback based on a “Not at all important” to “Extremely Important” is supposedly way more direct, clear and actionable.
After coming up with a list of hypotheses for input, we realized some of the statements were relevant to specific audiences. For example, it doesn’t make sense to ask non-tech users for inputs on back-end integration. We ended up splitting the survey into 3 funnels that presented relevant concept statements for evaluation based on the participant’s relation with Greenpeace:
- Volunteer / Donor / non-staff Supporter >> Funnel 1
- Greenpeace Webbie / Web content Manager / Tech fellow >> Funnel 2
- NRO / GPI Staff member >> Funnel 3
We spent some time grouping questions into themes and chunking the form into smaller sections so that people wouldn’t feel overwhelmed. We also added some text fields just in case anyone had more specific feedback.
At the end of the survey, a short questionnaire for additional comments or suggestions on the overall Concept was inserted, along with a chance to express interest in contributing to Planet 4 in the upcoming Design phase.
You can give feedback too:
Once answers are collected and data analyzed, we will prioritize the ideas and start working towards a minimum viable product (MVP). We’ll also be able to identify what’s missing/what needs to be created.
We’ll share the results in another post. Stay tuned and feel free to tweet at #GPP4, drop the planet 4 gang a line or comment below!
