How to Build a Feedback Plan in 7 Steps to Improve User Experiences

Service designers rely on user feedback to improve services. Set up correctly, a feedback plan will help uncover meaningful insights into how users are experiencing the service – the service journey and service deliverable.

Feedback Definition: “Information about reactions to a person’s performance?of a task, etc. which is used as a basis for improvement.”?(Oxford Dictionary)

Feedback, additionally, is useful for uncovering the motivations, aspirations, and determinations of users, along with any barriers or obstacles that exist in the way of achieving desired service outcomes.?A plan will reveal whether a service meets the provider’s specifications.

A plan sets up goals and aspirations for feedback in an overall process, which includes how information is collected, when, and the type of responses sought.

User Feedback Plan Template

1. Establish Goal(s):?What to learn from users

2. Service Performance

• Does the service respond to user needs?
• Is the result ‘satisfactory’ from using the service?
• Is (any) technology intuitive to use?
• Are (any) touchpoints needed to improve a user’s experience?

3. Identify Users

• Categorize users’ feedback matching demographics to personas
• Who among users are satisfied with the service journey using NPS (Scoring)

4. Build Framework

• Determine service intersections for insightful feedback
• Select question types based on anticipated analysis of data
• Choose feedback mechanism(s) based on qualitative/quantitative analysis (in-person, email response, intercepts, etc.)

5. Gathering Responses

• Monitor responses
• Consider needing multiple requests, incentives, and inventive ways to have users respond

6. Analyzing Results

• Analyze data with a mindset of story-telling
• Create reliable charts for a presentation using Tufte’s rules for visual communications

7. Next Steps

• Seek follow-on based on presented results

User feedback helps designers uncover user motivations, aspirations, determination, and barriers or obstacles to service outcomes. It’s also used to meet service specifications and eliminate wasted resources.

For service designers, feedback is ‘interaction’ and ‘causal effect.’ Interaction occurs between or among individuals, systems, or objects. The causal effect is one-way, providing user feedback to systems designers and service designers. The resulting impact from the feedback, either interactivity or causal effect, can be discerned backward or forward, as in negative and positive feedback:

An excerpt from The Master, a service design online course and book for improving user experiences.