What is feedback?
The issue with the term “feedback” lies in its broadness. Feedback itself is
nothing more than a reaction or response. Designers talk about feedback and
feedback loops all the time in their work. The user of a system or product
interacts with it in some way, perhaps by clicking a button, and the system
changes in one way or another. It could be that an animated loading bar
appears while some new data is fetched and displayed, or maybe some
elements in the interface move their position. See figure 1-1.
[Illustration of feedback in a UI]
That reaction by the system is the feedback. It is the system’s response to what
the user has done. Feedback is a reaction that occurs as a result of us doing
something. In human-to -human interactions like the conversations we have in
our projects, feedback can be nothing more than a gut reaction to whatever is
being presented. And to be quite honest, even though we might not want to
admit it, that’s often all it is.
Reactions might tell us a bit about how someone feels about what has
happened or been created, and that can be useful in some cases, but it also
presents us with some challenges. As we’ll discuss more in chapter 2, a
reaction doesn’t go far enough to be really helpful in allowing us to improve
our creations and move forward in our projects. Not only that, the reaction
itself is most likely built upon the biases and preferences of the individual
doing the reacting, and in many cases that individual, whether it’s a developer,
designer, stakeholder, etc. is not a representative of the audience for our
creation. There is a popular line in many design communities: “You are not the
user.” It’s important to keep that in mind when we’re discussing things we’re
creating and deciding what should or shouldn’t be a part of them.
The problem with asking for feedback is that, most times, we aren’t being
specific enough in describing what we really want feedback on. Sometimes we
might get a gut reaction. Sometimes we might get a list of instructions or
suggestions on what to change. Sometime we might get comments that
describe how what we’ve created doesn’t match what the critic would have
created, and so on. And weeding through all of that feedback to try to
determine what’s of use to us — what will help us identify the aspects of our
design that we should iterate upon — can be a struggle.
Three kinds of feedback
As Aaron and I have seen in our own experiences and through watching and
working with other teams, there are key characteristics that separate 3 forms of
feedback, all of which vary in their level of usefulness to us in the design