Here’s what to watch out for when collecting feedback

The new website you’ve commissioned is almost finished: after a period of brainstorming, designing and developing, your new digital home is almost ready to go live. This is the perfect time to run through everything one last time and go by the sites to collect feedback. But what do you look for and more importantly, how do you give good feedback on your new website? I’d like to help you with some tips.

With the numerous pages your website has and different devices to consider, something can always slip in between during design and development. While I try to cover as much as possible in our processes, this doesn’t always work out. Fortunately, I can catch this in the feedback phase of the website process, but you need to know what to look for.

Check the main components

Checking every element of your website can be tricky. Especially when your Web site has more than 30 pages, it can be difficult to have every detail tight at once. Therefore, start by making a list of the most important components. You can think about the following:

• The header and footer of your website;
• The forms for contact or newsletter subscriptions, for example;
• The call-to-action buttons on important pages like your homepage;
• The internal links to your other pages;

This will catch the annoying scenarios of your website going live, you patting yourself on the shoulder and then hearing that an important button or form doesn’t work for its intended purposes.

Apply the ‘four-eye principle’

When you start checking all the pages yourself, chances are you’re going to overlook something. At some point you can’t see the proverbial forest for the trees, and it’s no different with your website. Therefore, ask other people to help you check your website. This can be a colleague or partner, it doesn’t matter – as long as someone is watching.

In doing so, it is often smart to have more than one person watching, but be careful not to overdo it. If there are too many people, chances are you will get double feedback and the collection will take too much time. Should this be a requirement within your situation, try to divide the work cleverly: instead of everyone checking all the pages, divide the pages among the group. But make sure that each page is checked by at least two people and that there is agreement.

Distinguish between feedback and suggestions

So many people, so many wishes – I see it recurring all too often. Especially in feedback rounds, it frequently happens that someone sees a website for the first time and then starts giving an opinion on form and content, when that is not the focus of the pre-delivery feedback rounds.

Therefore, try to distill what kind of feedback someone gives. There’s no arguing about taste, of course, but avoid getting into eternal discussions about colors, images or texts. Instead, focus on the technique: do the pages appear as I expect and do the functionalities work properly. When this is done right, you’ll find that the feedback process will be much more efficient.

Know your target audience and their equipment

Your website should perform well on every modern device – that’s our goal with every project we deliver. But it can be tempting to start testing your website in the most impossible scenarios and see when it “breaks down. So our advice is to focus on what your website’s most important users are.

A handy tool to find out is Google Analytics, for example, and take a look at the overview of browsers and screen resolutions. If you see that 75 percent of all your visitors come in on mobile, it can’t hurt to grab your phone again and take a good look at your website there as well. Or have you noticed that a large number of visitors use a widescreen display? Then see if you can also test the website on such a screen.

Don’t know where to find these dates? Then contact us and we will be happy to help you.

Create a clear feedback document

Noticing that something is not working quite as it should is only half the battle – documenting it properly is just as important. So don’t just communicate what breaks, mention it:

• What page it is about;
• Whether it happens in another browser as well;
• Whether you can reproduce it consistently;
• How it should work;
• What kind of device you use;

In addition, always try to capture it visually with a screenshot or a video recording of your screen. This can already help a developer like myself fix it better. To give you a hand in advance, I have prepared a sample document for you here, which you can duplicate to collect concrete feedback.

Based on these principles, you quickly gather clear and concrete feedback that can be worked with. It is also good in this phase to listen to the wishes of the feedback givers and create a wish list. This way, even after the delivery of the website, you can continue to develop it according to your own priorities.

Have questions or want to spar about collecting feedback on your website? Then contact me – I’d love to help you out!