Actionable Feedbacks

I’ve done many usability testing for products that I worked on. User feedback is important for user-centric and data-driven design. We started off with some hypothesis, and these testings allow us to check our design and make informed decision on what to do in the next iteration.

User feedback is only as valuable as how you can make it actionable. And we all know, it doesn’t mean that when a user suggest an additional feature to perform a certain task, and the team jump right in to fulfil it.

In one of the usability test on a dashboard product, a user feedback that the UI is not intuitive. He suggested that putting a Run button would solve the problem. Upon asking and seeing how he use the dashboard and why he wants a Run button, I realised that he’s selecting filtering options and he didn’t quite sure if the new result is reflected in the dashboard. He feels that if he can select the filtering options and click on a Run button, he would know for sure that the system has taken in his inputs.

I facilitated a workshop to find out the actual problem that we should tackle. We have to do it remotely due to the current working arrangement, but we end up with good outputs. We realised that, firstly the system does not respond immediately when user select filter options. Secondly, the filtered output is not be very different from before the filtering due to some bugs. Thus, user often have doubts that the system has taken the inputs and has generated the new data.

We came together to go through a super mini design sprint, a mix of components from design thinking and design sprint, series of diverge and converge exercises. Everyone sketch, snap, upload photos, to a common online workspace. Different background and different perspectives. Ideas build on ideas. Give form to ideas. The outcome is designs that we can test.