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: So, which of these scenarios do you think will get you to clarity the fastest? It’s obviously the last one. Gathering feedback at every stage. Every new product […]

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: The secret is to find ways to layer feedback in at each stage. And if you’re able to do this, then you’ll drastically increase your odds of getting to clarity.

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: But the idea is […]

 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: The important things to keep in […]

Another valuable source of customer feedback can be support tickets. They tend to be easy to search. You can scan for patterns. And you can probably review 60 plus tickets in about an hour. The cool thing is that you know the customer is already in a habit of communicating via email. So you can […]

There are a number of services that you can use to record and then replay actual user sessions on your site. A couple of examples would be Microsoft clarity, which is free, PostHog, FullStory, and HotJar. The cool thing about these services is that you can record sessions across multiple pages. You can see where […]

Support forums can be another good source of customer feedback. This can be similar to support tickets, but with forums, you’ll see multiple people add feedback to the same thread, which can be handy. You can use forums to search for specific queries around areas of the app that you’re currently working on. If your […]

Inline surveys or polls within your product can be a great way to gather feedback from customers. You’ll tend to gather the best data by not showing the poll to everyone, but by targeting exactly who you want to solicit feedback from. There are a bunch of tools out there that allow you to do […]

Beta groups are a great way to test features and get feedback prior to shipping them. Again, it’s probably best to target specific segments of users. To solicit users, you can use a dismissible in-app banner or pop-up. You could email a targeted set of customers. You can also announce it on social media, on […]

Another way that you can gather design feedback is by scheduling individual customer interviews. Generally, I like to have a number of structured questions in mind before I start the call and then once you get into the call, it can be more free form. If possible, I’ve found it handy to have someone on […]

Another option that you have to generate a stream of customer interviews is to have office hours. Instead of proactively scheduling individual customer interviews, you can use a tool like Calendly to block out one to two hours each week. Usually in like 30 minute increments. Then advertise these time slots as office hours that […]

The idea of advisory boards is similar to beta groups, but more selective. Customer advisory boards can be an invaluable source of feedback. Made up of half a dozen to a dozen passionate customers. Generally hand selected and invited. You’d create a slack channel. Where you can communicate with all advisory board members. Why create […]

It can be helpful to make time for concierge calls. This is when you hop on a call with a new customer and you spend about an hour with them going through and helping them get set up. It’s good to block out time for one or two of these each week. You can help […]

A/B testing is a pretty common technique in tech companies these days. That said it’s often overlooked as a form of design feedback. A/B testing is handy. When you have enough traffic to run the test. In a reasonable amount of time. You’re testing just one single change versus another. You have the right infrastructure […]

Daily journals are a handy technique that you can use if you’re designing remotely. I picked this idea up from Buzz Usborne. I had the pleasure of working with Buzz at HelpScout. He wrote about it in a post that I’ll link to. The idea is to have a centralized doc that you constantly update […]

Bi-weekly design snaps is an idea that I attribute to Joen A – a talented designer that I’ve had the pleasure of working with for 10+ years at Automattic. The idea is to round up visual artifacts—could be screenshots, or gifs, or videos representing the progress your design team has made over the past two […]

In my experience, the max ratio that you should have for engineers to designers is eight to one. In some companies, the ratio will be way higher than that. In my experience, the ratio is almost never lower than that. When you’ve got a ratio of eight to one, chances are you’ll be designing multiple […]

A call for feedback is a post that you share internally once the design you’re working on is ready for feedback. This could be multiple posts, each at a different stage in the design process, or it could just be a single post. The goal of the post is to solicit feedback from folks outside […]