How Important Is Feedback to UX Designers

While designing the SaaS scorecard during my summer internship at VMware, I conducted 4 design iterations. Usually I spent the first two days designing prototype, and the rest three days asking for feedback from target users and peer designers.

This project is mainly about dashboard design and data visualization, and I strongly feel that feedback is so important during the whole design iteration process. First of all, I myself have been very familiar with all the charts and diagrams, so it was really hard for me to judge whether or not a visualization is intuitive or insightful. One example is the color bar I designed on homepage to represent the overall health of each SaaS product. While looking at it, I felt so confident that users wouldn't have any problem understanding it. However, during use test, many of them weren't be able to answer me when I asked "what information do you get from the color bar?" They told me that they know it represented the general health, but they didn't know what the color meant. "Does green means good?" "What should I do if it's yellow?" They asked questions like those. Then I realized they couldn't make much sense from this color bar. Yes, it might look beautiful (at least I was thinking like that), but to users, it didn't convey any useful information. 

There were other examples like this as well. During the design iterations, I really appreciate all the feedback I got from users or peer designers. I also realize designers should quickly fix the issues they found during user test before heading into the next round of testing. The reason is that people are more intend to find obvious problems. If you don't fix it, then users will always focus on the issues you already found during the previous test. I think that's why agile design and feedback should be well combined in the User Centered Design process.