Capturing User Feedback
In this post I’m going to share with you my process for how I capture user feedback when performing customer interviews remotely. Capturing user feedback accurately is essential for a couple reasons. One, the information and learning you get does not just have a short term impact. This feedback can play into design decisions that are made in the future; it’s important to remember what you captured so you can reference it later. Lastly, unless you’re a one person team, you need to share the user feedback with other people in an organized, easy-to-digest manner. These are the steps and methods I use to control the process in an efficient and informative way.
1. Organizing Interviewees
I like to do this in a low-fi way as to not add a lot of overhead to my process. With the help of the client, I create a list of interviewee leads. Either myself or the client will reach out to them to warm them up and tell them what we’re doing and why we need their feedback. Then I’ll send an email asking to setup a time to talk. Keeping track of the status of each potential interviewee can get unwieldy very quickly. For this reason I use a simple Kanban board made in Keynote to keep track of where people are in the process. This allows me to very quickly understand who I need to continue reaching out to. Download the Keynote file.
2. Interviewee Information & Notes
I start off every user interview with casual conversation to make the user comfortable and I also want to get to know them. I have a folder of text files organized by users names. In the text file is some basic information about them like what they do, where they work and their contact information. I may include some basic questions in the text file that I ask all users and will record those notes there. This is also where I’ll eventually export an .MP4 audio file of our conversation.
3. Sharing Artifacts & Capturing Feedback
Before I interview people, I need a place to share artifacts like designs, sketches and wireframes with the people you’ll be talking to. My favorite method is to use RedPen.io. RedPen is great because I can upload an artifact and people can leave comments directly on it. Alternatively, I can use it to record the notes that I take. Either way it’s great to see the comment correlated directly to the part of the interface it’s referring to. RedPen is also very useful because unlike Dropbox – it doesn’t get blocked by Enterprise firewalls as much. Below is an example of a sketch I sent to someone I was interviewing. This person in particular was very enthusiastic about offering feedback, so much so that she came back to RedPen in her own time the next day and added more thoughts.
In addition to note taking I will record the user interviews (with permission) whenever possible. Screenflow is great and I can export the audio of the interviews so I can easily reference them later.
4. Organizing Feedback (For Sharing & Distribution)
This is something that is best done as you are collecting feedback; it is best done when fresh. In a Keynote file I place in the artifact that was used during the interview, the user’s name and basic information like where they work and what they do. I use the bubble/comment shape and transfer over my feedback notes from RedPen. This allows everyone on my team to see exactly what feedback was left and where.
I hope you enjoyed this post. If you have any questions, be sure to leave them in a comment and I’ll reply!