Finding Feedback
Getting Feedback When You Don’t Know What You Need
It was a Tuesday morning, and I was on yet another Zoom call for a project that had been delayed and dragged out for months. My team had made a huge push to get a working website ready by the end of the quarter, and now we needed feedback to ensure we had hit the mark.
After weeks of hearing that the stakeholders had been too busy to review the site, I wasn’t going to accept that excuse again. Today, I would use a portion of the 30-minute meeting they had scheduled with me to finally get the feedback I needed.
It was an ambush!
No, not really. They just received a harmless email from me as the meeting started. Each email contained a simple task for them to complete on the website. Most of the tasks were straightforward, like: place an order for this specific product scheduled for these dates.
I asked one of the stakeholders to share their screen as they completed the task.
"Let’s go through this together. If you have any questions along the way, I can provide some guidance."
As we worked through the task, questions started flying in. Questions about the task itself, the color scheme, the button placements, what happens in this scenario, and what about that?
The meeting ended with all the stakeholders declaring, “It looks good.” But in reality, I had extracted a wealth of feedback that I could use to deliver a better finished product.
Unlocking Better Feedback (Part Two)
This is part two of my series on unlocking better feedback on your creative work. Last week, we discussed how to ask for specific feedback. This week, we’re looking at how to get useful feedback when you’re unsure what you need feedback on.
Provide a Simple Task
This is really just another way to reframe the feedback request. It takes the pressure off the reviewer to come up with specific critiques. Giving them a task immediately gets them invested in your work with a clear goal.
Coming up with a task may be easier for some mediums than others, so you may have to get creative. Here are a few examples:
Fiction Writing:
Can you describe this character for me?
How do you imagine this location?
How do you perceive this relationship?
Painting or Sculpture:
If you could place this piece anywhere in the world, where would it be?
Music:
Pick a band or musician you’d want to hear play this song.
This doesn’t necessarily have to feel like a task. The goal is to get the person to start thinking about your work in a way that makes them invested. Once that happens, they’ll naturally open up and share their thoughts.
Pay Attention to the Questions
In my example, the stakeholders walked away feeling like they had simply told me, “It looks good.” But on my end, I was writing down every question they asked, because each one was valuable feedback.
Sometimes, feedback isn’t given directly. If a friend tells you they’d love to hear U2 cover your song, you might need to rethink your song (and possibly reconsider your friendship). What I mean is, if the feedback you receive doesn’t match your intention, that could indicate an area that needs work.
Some feedback will be obvious, but often, you’ll need to dig deeper into the questions to figure out what they’re really telling you. I’ll cover that in depth in part three of this series.
Apply the Feedback, Then Ask for Specific Feedback
In the weeks following my meeting, I implemented changes to the website based on the questions that had come up. As I made these improvements, I followed up with the person who originally raised the concern.
"In our meeting, there was some confusion about the date selector. I made some adjustments, does this make the blackout dates clearer?"
Since they were already invested in this aspect, I didn’t need to reframe my request. At this point, I could simply ask for direct feedback, so long as I specified exactly what I wanted feedback on.
Next Week
Hopefully, you now have a stack of feedback. Some of it will be immediately useful, but some you might not like. You may also have noted a few questions that you’re unsure what to do with.
Next week, we’ll go over how to get the most out of these questions and figure out what to do with feedback you’re uncertain about in part three of this series.