13. Interpreting Feedback, and Using It to Iterate

Alright, so we conducted our first user test. Awesome! Now it’s time to take the information we got, and to make sense of it all.

It’s important to remember that humans are, well, human. Outliers exist in qualitative feedback, and you will have to use your best judgement about which feedback you choose to focus on. A great way to do this is to synthesize your notes, comparing user tests to one another, and trying to find common issues with your application.

It’s also likely that your user testing reveals some very straightforward findings such as bugs, or things you simply missed in your personal evaluation of your experience, that will not need to be a trend across multiple users.

Remember, your findings will not always have a straightforward solution. For example, your finding might be:

People don’t understand what the orbs are for, and they confuse them.

There could be many ways to solve this problem, and you will have to use your best judgement as a designer to solve them.

After you have some findings from your user test (good or bad) write them down as single sentences.

Using these sentences, try to adjust two or more shortcomings of your application using your findings. If these problems persist over multiple user tests as we go through this course, make sure to revisit them.

Optional: User test again to assess the effectiveness of your changes.