Feedback Grids

A Feedback Grid is a simple four-question grid to gather feedback from stakeholders in a quick and constructive way.

It is a tool designed to help you structure the information gathered from user testing. This tool can be adapted to any situation with two or more people when you are looking to solicit constructive feedback. The structure of the feedback grid helps people to organize and express their thoughts in a systematic way.

The feedback process is the most important way to improve a prototype, idea, and you as a designer. Using a feedback grid can help you stay open-minded to ideas no matter where they come from. If you have to shoot-down an idea, the grid can provide data and end user experiences to justify your thinking.

End users often have only a vaguely formed idea on improvement that can be difficult to express in design terms. As a designer, you are entrusted with figuring out how to put their ideas into action and shepherding them through the many inevitable pitfalls and challenges. 

Part of a designer’s role is to educate, particularly when dealing with a non-designer audience. When you plan to show a room of professionals a low-fi prototype, explain briefly what it is and how it might help to address the specific challenge it was designed for.

The Feedback Grid is made up of four quadrants that seek four categories of information: “Things that worked,” “Needs to change,” “New ideas to try,” and “Questions we still have”

Giving & Receiving Feedback

Use these readings, videos, and other resources to learn more about feedback as a technique for improving yourself, your designs, and your prototypes.

Strategies & Tips for Success

Make your efforts to gather feedback more effective by keeping these strategies and tips in mind:

Clearly explain why you are asking for feedback and how the feedback will be used

Provide copies of the Feedback Grid or ask each contributor to draw a two-by-two grid that fills the page, and label the quadrants:

• Upper left—“What I like about this idea”

• Upper right—“What I would improve”

• Lower left—“What questions I still have”

• Lower right—“What new ideas this gives me”

Give everyone time to jot down their notes in the appropriate quadrants.

Do not interject, re-define, or paraphrase a person’s feedback as this can negate a person’s experience. Simply actively listen and take word-for-word notes

When asking questions using the Feedback Grid, be careful not to become defensive as people suggest improvements to your idea

If you’re working with someone one-on-one, you can also ask them the questions out loud and note down their responses. This lets you ask questions to better understand their feedback, and works better for people who prefer speaking to writing.

If you are collecting feedback ‘on-the-fly,’ try to fill the grid while you still have a fresh memory of what happened, it will help you identify details that you might forget.

After you collect enough feedback grids on the same issue, you can compare or merge them into a single one to spot patterns and identify next steps.

Practical Activities & Learning

1) Review the end user journey maps and prototypes you created. Choose one to work with for this activity.

2) Identify 4-5 end users that interact with the program, process, or service in question.

3) Ask them to provide feedback on the journey maps and prototypes. At least two should be filled in by the end user themselves.

4) Prepare one summary feedback grid and an associated narrative to summarize your feedback.

5) List out 3-5 key changes you plan to make to the prototype or journey map.

In the Field

As a neighborhood consultant, you can submit up to 50 feedback grids collected from end users of the processes you are working on improving. Notes and outputs should be summarized and shared to enhance our learning.

Feedback Grid Field Journal Worksheets available on request from aaron[at]akroadvice.com