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How to bring up inconvenient feedback, or when user insights aren’t about design
If you see something, saying something can help your team immensely
“There’s one other thing I’d like to bring up,” I said. I was 95% sure my suggestion would be rejected, but it was essential to talk about it.
Last week, I discussed how designers sometimes feel uncomfortable making direct design recommendations to the team. Whether it’s a fear of hierarchy or being challenged, some designers struggle to recommend things directly.
But even if you’re okay talking about design recommendations, you sometimes uncover deep insights that aren’t directly related to UX.
In those cases, it’s still important to speak up because you are often the first person to notice these problems,
Talking to users often uncovers deep insights outside of design
Designers are often the first ones to uncover signs of a new problem. To explain what I mean, let’s use the analogy of a pebble in your shoe.
For some people, a pebble in their shoe isn’t a problem. Sure, it’s annoying, and they might be slightly frustrated by it, but they’re willing to put up with it in certain circumstances.
So it doesn’t become a customer complaint or come up in sales calls. Customers don’t complain about it on social media. Moreover, many users may not believe anyone can solve their problems, so they don’t complain.
However, when designers spend a lot of time talking with users (testing another feature), users are often willing to voice their frustrations over their current experience.
Whether it’s a 30-minute rant about how your product makes their job difficult or why they never use a particular feature, your interview is often the first time anyone in the organization has heard this feedback.
One typical example of this is the company’s homepage. You might be testing the task of “Getting to the feature from the homepage,” but you might see that 4/5 struggled (and voiced frustration) using our top-level navigation menus.
