The Importance of Feedback

Throughout this trimester it can be, and has been, easy to lose focus on what makes your designs great. Hell, for a majority of the trimester I wasn't a massive fan of my own work. When designing an entire suite of branding items for an upcoming company, it is increasingly important to gather constructive feedback from your peers to determine the best result moving forward.

Upon conducting more research for myself into user testing, I was able to identify a few key questions that I had to ask myself, before asking others.

Startquestion.com (2016) outlined the importance of customer feedback in any business. They determined that customer feedback helps improve products and services, measure customer satisfaction, shows value of their opinions, helps you create the best customer experience, improve customer retention, gives you data to help making critical business decisions, and works as a reliable source of information to other consumers.

Improving products and services is important as it proves if you have to have an understanding of the audience that you are targeting. Professional knowledge is worthless if your customers values aren't your highest priority. 

Measuring customer satisfaction is a critical factor to build up brand loyalty and is a determination of the companies financial performance. Customer satisfaction and business performance have been proven to be hand-in-hand with each other.

Valuing customers opinions makes them feel more involved with the shaping and foundations of the business that you are creating. User testing surveys are a good way to show your customers that you value their opinions, and will be more inclined to recommend your products or services if they feel that they were involved in some way. People will always appreciate you taking the time and effort to see if they are happy (or unhappy) with your services.

Creating the best customer experience is made a hell of a lot easier when you focus on providing a brand worth being loyal to. Demonstrate that you value them as customers and purchasing your product will improve their lives through status or affiliation.

Improving customer retention is crucial as an unhappy customer will always be looking for an alternative solution to yours. Customer service feedback forms are a helpful way to determine if, and why, your customers are unhappy. If there is an issue that needs rectifying, then acting quickly will show that you are determined to make them happy. This will improve a larger devotion to your brand.

Using data to help make business decisions takes the guesswork out of the equation. There is no point making business decisions loosely withing a competitive market. Use this ability to tabulate data via user testing to produce the best product for your customers.

Remember, this is your most reliable source of information to other consumers. Word of mouth travels like wildfire a lot better than social media advertisements and "stellar Yelp reviews". Companies such as Uber and UberEats allow customers to rate their experiences with the service and the data is a reliable way to provide someone with the best quality product.

The Survey is available here: forms.gle/osLvqtFGKzKx88uN9

After conducting this research, I was determined to hear what my peers had to say in regards to what I had developed so far throughout this trimester. I sent friends and family a link to my GoogleForm to get as much feedback as possible.

This feedback was a little less helpful as I intended, as a majority of the people are either "too nice" to give me genuine feedback and just answered with "Don't change a thing. Love it."

However, 8 people found that Larson Designs was the more professional option. So I moved forward.
Speaking of moving forward, I asked people to review the pins that I will be making up for Synergy, and 60% of people said they would collect them all. 20% said they would collect 4-12 of them. Hopefully Synergy goes well and they spark enough interest that they'll be going into full production in 2020.

The best response I got for my business card design was "Dude that's fucking FIRE I think it's good." 

People seemed to really enjoy the business card box, as it shows a sample of the designs within the cutout of the box.

60% of people surveyed were able to easily identify the vectored plants that I did for Cypress.

And finally, The Arc poster...
A lot of really decent suggestions that will be taken into consideration moving forward. I got told it looked like "FIRE" again haha. A few suggestions hinting towards adding arcades in the background etc. More information suggesting it's a bar/arcade.

A lot to think about, which was made possible by the constructive use of User Feedback forms.

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References

7 Reasons Why Customer Feedback Is Important To Your Business. (2016). Retrieved 27 November 2019, from https://blog.startquestion.com/7-reasons-why-customer-feedback-is-important-to-your-business-28e99c00eba7