Along with Sherry Wang and Debbie Ly I’ve spent the last three months as an intern in the New York studio of Made by Many, and during that time one of the most striking things I’ve learned is that the worst feedback you can get from users is, “This is okay.” This seemed an unnatural approach to development when I first heard it. I thought, if users don’t have a problem with the product, it must be fine. Why fix something that isn’t broken? As it turns out, just because something isn’t broken doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. The problem with “this is okay” is that it provides no direction for the next iteration of development. Instead, more valuable feedback will give further insight into why the user does or does not like the product.

Hearing regular user feedback is essential to Made by Many’s process. In order to get that valuable user feedback, the design needs to encourage reactions. This is called design for testing. That is, the designs we show to users aren’t necessarily the designs we plan to develop. Instead, the designs test concepts. It is better to design something “wrong” so that the user will correct it and describe what they are looking for and why. Testing these kinds of designs is important because we can get more valuable feedback on certain features and make design decisions based on these reactions. The quick turnaround of each prototype also means that we are able to test everything we design before we build it, minimising the margin of error.

The idea of a quick turnaround is embodied by rapid prototyping. Teams at Made by Many are encouraged to produce a prototype regularly to get the client’s feedback as much as possible. While the intern team technically doesn’t have a client, we’ve stuck with the idea of rapid prototyping. We show each iteration of our prototype to people we have identified as target users, and for the past six weeks our schedule has been alternating one week of design and prototyping with one week of interviews and synthesis. Therefore, each week we can show our users new features and hear their reactions. You can read more about our week-by-week progress on our Medium blog.

Quick turnarounds and frequent testing go hand-in-hand with designing for testing. The benefit of this system is that we end up testing every feature in the product. Each week we focus on testing a few key hypotheses that we have about our users. To do this, we design for testing, with polarizing prototypes that could be completely wrong so that users will respond either extremely negatively or extremely positively.

This is the most valuable kind of feedback because our users will say things like, “I love this feature because ______” or, “I hate this and I would never use it because it doesn’t have ______”. The content they share as justification for loving or hating something helps us fully understand users and their expectations for the product. At the end of the day, we are building for the users, so we encourage an open conversation with the user to get a better understanding of product needs.