Feedback and reflections are incredibly useful tools that are often overlooked by teams both in industry and academia.
And who’s to blame them? It’s easy to misconstrue feedback as a personal attack and blame on the individual, rather than constructive feedback on their work. That’s why companies like IDEO, IBM, and many others have created numerous design methods that make the process of collecting feedback more approachable. In this article, I’ll be focusing on a method I used during my design process — IBM’s Feedback Grid.
What is it?
Essentially, the Feedback Grid is a tool to help your team gather feedback (surprise!) and reflect on your work. It looks like a windowpane with four quadrants labeled as follows:
- Things that worked
- Needs improvement/change
- Unanswered questions
- New ideas moving forward
How does it work?
With the grid drawn, every member of your team captures their constructive feedback onto a sticky note and places it into the respective quadrant. This can either be done silently or in a talk-aloud format depending on the team’s preference. Continue drawing ideas until the team runs out of ideas — you don’t want to time-box this activity and miss important feedback!
After everyone has exhausted their ideas, the team can begin to look for patterns in each quadrant, clustering similar notes together under a specific theme. For example, “scheduling interviews earlier” and “reaching out to more stakeholders” might go under the theme of Outreach. Keep doing this until completion! There might be a few notes that don’t fall into any specific theme — that’s okay!
Finally, take a picture of the board for future reference and discuss action steps based on all the feedback collected.
Why use it?
One clear advantage of this method is its simplicity. We, as humans, instinctively like to categorize things — it helps us better make sense of this rich and complex world around us. This method builds off our tendency, making it very easy to pick up even for non-designers.
Because it’s simple to use, another pro is its versatility! Not only can your team use this to reflect after hitting a project milestone, but you can also use it for collecting feedback during user-testing, analyzing an as-is scenario, or simply realigning a team mid-way through a project. The method is an open canvas — feel free to use it as creatively as you’d like!
As with all reflection tools, the Feedback Grid is meant to facilitate open conversation and constructive criticism, but it is ultimately up to you — the individual — to take action upon the feedback.
An Example
Here’s a Feedback Grid my team and I did after one of our research playbacks. Note that we tried to cluster our feedback into as many themes as possible, but there were still a few remaining stragglers.
My team and I were super happy with the overall vibe and comradery during each session. In the Needs Improvement quadrant, you’ll notice we had been struggling to determine who our target audience was, as well as what kind of stakeholders we wanted to talk to. Our questions related to our concern about pinpointing stakeholders, the medium of our final design solution, and so on.
After we finished the Feedback Grid, we took the feedback, shared it with our team lead, and eventually narrowed down our target users.
