Dealing with user feedback

Recently Shopify launched its new forums. I played a pretty big role in designing the site and was anxious to see the response from the community.

Old:

New:

The initial response was great, everyone in the office thought the design was good and the community liked the refresh. After a week the “real” feedback started to come in, most of it being small bugs I missed. However some of the forum regulars began to discuss their distaste for the new wysiwyg editor (before we just had a manual text editor).

This made me realize that I don’t have a methodology in place to interpret feedback. After researching how other designers deal with feedback I came across a good presentation by ex-Digg UI designer Daniel Burka on how Digg interprets feedback.

To sum it up his talk: Daniel gives his 5 types of feedback (positive, bugs,  negative, expert, implicit). He then discusses how he reacts to feedback:

1. Don’t do anything – don’t fix it just yet you don’t have the full picture (wait 48 hours to a week)
2. Identify themes and strong ideas – go look at what people are actually saying
3. Engage your community – talk and interact with your community
4. Iterate – ask yourself: is this a good way to respond to the feedback? What negative effects could our response to the feedback have?

After watching his talk and reading more about it. I came to these conclusions regarding the new forums

1. I wasn’t ready to interpret any kind of implicit feedback and I couldn’t answer: How do I measure how users that aren’t registered or don’t post often react to the new forums?
2. When I redesigned the forum I didn’t have any goals/metrics in mind other than “Give it a fresh new look and people will use it more”. I should have been ready to track how many new users were registering per week on the new forums vs. the old forums. On top of that I don’t think I explored the question “What do I want to achieve with these new forums” deeply enough.
3. It might have been a good idea to involve the community during the redesign of the forums, but this can be a recipe for disaster. People will be offended if I don’t take their suggestions and I feel obligated to respond to all feedback since I asked for it in the first place. I did contact the forum’s most active members and ask for their opinion after launch and their feedback was very useful.

Overall I think the forums were a success, but there is a lot of headroom for improving my work flow especially in regards to anticipating and interpreting user feedback. If you want to read some more on interpreting feedback look up Mark Boulton, he gave an excellent account on how his design by committee approach is working with Drupal.

Trying to remember how to manipulate

Trying to get back into form with two unfinished photo manipulations. I used to be pretty good at this stuff and want to get back into it.

I want to be part of the elite

If you are the slightest bit passionate about web design you have heard of the big names in the industry: Zeldam, Clarke, Boulton, Cederholm, Hicks, Pieters, and so on. These are the people that command massive respect among the designer community and I want to be one of those people.

I don’t think I will ever be able to design as well as Jesse Bennett Chamberlain or  Cameron Moll, but I am going to try really hard.

Since I am finished with school I can now focus on achieving my goals and here is what I am going to do:

1. No more “standard” projects. The last few years designing websites for clients have been too straightforward. I meet with you, I ask you want you want done, and you say go. Rarely will the standard “run of the mill” websites be exciting or challenging. About 7 months ago I completed Sugar Baking that was such a great project to work on for 2 reasons: the client was amazing to work with and I had never built an ecommerce platform before. This is the type of project where I feel like a pushed my design and development skills to a whole new level.
2. Build a network. I barely know anyone in the web design industry. Next year I will be going to my first web design conference (FOWA) and I know I will meet some really amazing people there. I don’t really use twitter to its full extent; there are so many amazing designers on there and I am going to more proactive in getting in touch with them.
3. Focus on e-commerce. E-commerce is an underdeveloped area of the web and is a great opportunity to become an expert in the area. Next year I will open up my second e-commerce store, but this time around sell a physical good instead of digital ones. Delving deeper into UI and web analytics is another one of my goals for next year, but I need to brush up on my Ruby and Javascript before I begin to explore other areas.
4. Get an identity. My online presence is not great. I am on all the social networks, twitter, last fm, flickr, facebook and I have a blog – obviously, but when you google “Mark Dunkley” there are only a handful of pages related to me. Submitting my websites to CSS showcases, building a stronger portfolio, producing more quality content on the web, and expanding my professional network will help achieve this goal.

On a final note I want to mention 3 individuals that are close to my age and examples of where I want to be in the next couple years: Megan Fisher (at 23 she has already been a speaker at a FOWD), Tim Van Damme (an amazing 23 year old designer), Dustin Curtis (talented designer with a strong passion for UI and life).