Be curious

Welcome to better design feedback! This is a free course for designers, engineers, product people. We all know we should solicit feedback. But sometimes it can feel hard. This course came about as I was hanging out with a bunch of designers from Automattic. As we were talking throughout the week at a meetup, ways […]

If I had to boil this course down to a single phrase, it’s: Be curious. As the designer. You don’t just design pretty things. You’re like good scientist, always experimenting and searching for new ideas. You’re like a psychologist, understanding how people think, act, and feel. You’re like an Explorer discovering new ways to solve […]

Before we get into all of the many ways that you can solicit feedback. Let’s first talk about your gut. I’m a firm believer that your gut really matters. Probably more so than our industry likes to admit. But what is your gut? It’s a combination of the experience and insights you’ve picked up over […]

Time to clarity is the time it takes to reach confidence that your design will work. We can think about this across a couple of different scenarios: Scenario one, you never talked to any of your customers. Scenario two. You ask customers for feedback after you launch a feature. Scenario three, you have a beta […]

Everyone knows that they should spend time with customers. Sadly in many tech companies, this doesn’t actually happen. Some product companies have dedicated departments of people who communicate with customers. This has always felt like a shame to me. Some companies, relegate customer feedback to designers. This is equally a shame in my mind. Gathering […]

It’s helpful if you gather feedback at each stage of the design process: You can gather feedback before you even start a project. You can gather feedback after you have a few rough concepts. After you have wireframes. After you have an HTML prototype. You can do it prelaunch when you’ve got something coded up, […]

Layering your feedback at each stage can help you get to clarity as quickly as possible. A common pitfall that I see. Is that designers find one or two techniques that they fall in love with? And they just stick with those two techniques. In this course, you’ll learn dozens of techniques that you can […]

Whenever you’re asking for feedback, it’s good to be as specific as possible about the type of feedback that you want. This can save other people time and it can help avoid having rabbit hole discussions about things that you’re not ready to focus on yet. Depending on the stage that you’re at with your […]

In this section, we’ll talk about a dozen techniques that you can use to gather customer feedback. One of the most valuable ways that I’ve found to solicit feedback is to make a list of relevant users and just email them. You can go about this a couple of different ways: You may have analytics […]

 Another way to solicit feedback is to ask folks who just signed up for your product. This can be a valuable source of feedback. And it also allows you to get a better feel for who is signing up. There are a lot of ways to go about this: You can ask questions directly in […]