A Guide to Conducting Feedback Campaigns
By: Jimmy Soh
Tags: User Testing, User Experience Design, User Experience, Surveys, Campaign

A Guide to Conducting Feedback Campaigns

Five tips to increase your reach to obtain quality feedback from participants during the COVID-19 lockdown period

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

Gathering constructive feedback for design screen flows is tough. It’s especially challenging when everyone’s working from home during this COVID-19 lockdown period.

I’ve created a set of screen flows and user journeys in the form of an interactive PowerPoint presentation to obtain user feedback for validation and improvement. I’ve compiled approximately ten user flows into a single PowerPoint deck for review.

The next step is to think about how I can ensure that people take the time to participate (considering their busy schedules) and make an effort to provide the best feedback they can.

I’ll be sharing the measures incorporated to obtain useful feedback during this challenging period.

#1: Create a campaign with incentives

Lucky draws and prizes are a cheap and effective way to drive participation. When appropriately used, e.g. in the form of contests, you’ll be able to get a large number of quality responses from participants. Having a chance to win something makes it worth people’s time to participate — provided the incentive is attractive enough.

A proven approach from my experience with marketing campaigns (in Singapore’s context) is to use vouchers, i.e. from Starbucks, Grab, CapitaLand, etc. The amount can vary depending on the efforts required and the target audience’s time. So far, the amounts that I have worked with range from S$20 to S$50 vouchers.

You can either compensate the participant’s time by offering them a voucher outright or use the voucher as a prize from a competition. I have found the latter to be the most effective; the former may have ethical implications in conservative companies.

#2: State the objectives upfront clearly

When sending out a digital document, e.g. PowerPoint, to a group of people, it’s essential to state the objectives upfront clearly before overwhelming the participants with information. Stating the objectives upfront puts the participant in the appropriate context to provide relevant responses to address your objectives.

If you’re using email as your channel, you can consider following this approach and state the following:

Indicate clearly in the email subject that inputs are required, e.g. “Inputs Required.” Why you need their help, e.g. design a suitable solution. How they can help, e.g. follow steps in the document. What would you be doing with their feedback, e.g. incorporate into solution Lastly, when do you need it, e.g. by next week

From the email, people would get a sense of what you need from them. When they open the document, you can further include a summary of the objectives in the first slide to reinforce the need for good feedback.

#3: Provide visuals and clear step by step instructions

After stating the objectives and putting the participant in the right context and frame of mind to help you, this step focuses on making it easy for them to do it — while allowing you acquire the relevant information. If the steps to navigate the document and provide feedback is too complicated and confuses people, we wouldn’t be able to get constructive responses.

I leveraged on three ways to make my document easy to navigate for the participants:

Use popover walkthroughs — for each screen flow, use tour boxes to guide users on where should they click for each step. Provide a summary — for each screen flow, provide an overview of the intended business outcome/value in the form of a welcome modal/screen Provide the steps with visuals — for the feedback document, instruct users how to insert comments and feedback into the material with visual aids, etc.

I have found popover walkthroughs extremely useful in guiding users to navigate your hi-fi prototype. A sample is shown below—more information on creating good walkthroughs can be found online.

As for the provisioning of feedback, you may want to provide some suggestions on the guidelines. Here are the ones I used:

Frame your feedback with a context — indicate your role and the goal to be achieved.

— indicate your role and the goal to be achieved. Be clear and specific — describe the category of feedback, e.g. aesthetics, usability, process, content, etc.

— describe the category of feedback, e.g. aesthetics, usability, process, content, etc. Describe problems, avoid solutions — provide “why” rather than “how”; avoid prescriptive requests, e.g. “change this colour to red”, etc.

It’d be better if you could provide a sample response for each guideline so that your audience would know what’s the standard and use that as reference.

It’s a delicate balance between providing too much information which would confuse the user, and providing sufficient guidance to achieve the outcome without being physically present to guide your participants.

#4: Communicate through influential people and leaders

You may not have the capacity to reach out to many colleagues in a large corporate environment. It’s more effective to go through leadership or influential people in the organization to reach out to sub-teams and departments as people are generally more inclined to assist people that they are familiar with.

To reach out to the leaders and influential people, you’ll have to find a way to sell the idea to them and get their buy-in. You can either do it via a pitch or strategically involve them at the early stage of your initiative.

#5: Choose the right timing and set a deadline

Setting a deadline provides a sense of urgency to reach a target. While you may have your hard deadline to meet, it’s recommended to set a soft deadline that’s slightly earlier than your hard deadline. Based on experience, people often miss the soft deadline, and you’ll have to send reminders and bumps to complete the feedback constantly.

It’s also important to choose the right timing, e.g. lull periods, to send out the feedback survey. The responses wouldn’t be of quality if surveys were sent during peak periods when people are busy.

I have found segmenting the participants into different groups and catering the timing based on the activities of the segments an effective way to get quality responses. Being in the loop of the activities and events of your target segments, e.g. observe through emails, outlook calendars activities, etc. provide you with a good idea on when would be the best time to reach out to them.