Involving Your Board in Feedback Processes
One of the questions that came up in a Usability Testing Session at the NTEN Conference this week was one that our non profit clients ask us all the time: “How do we involve our board in gathering feedback?” The implicit question there, and no offense to board members here, is “How do I involve my board but not get overly swayed/pushed by their feedback?” The further implied statement is that often boards don’t represent the target audiences for an organization and yet by priviledge of their positions they can really influence the website design and development process.
While there’s no magic bullet solution for this issue, one way to mitigate potential problems is to ask your board for very specific feedback. Re-articulate the website and communications goals and ask for specific feedback on those goals. Don’t ask “Do you like how it looks” ask “Do you think this website communicate the following: a sense of engagement, a sense of leadership, a sense of authority on issues, etc.” (But of course replace those feelings with whatever the goals for your project/your organization are). Then ask them questions based on other communications goals that were set out for the website like “Does this design make it easy to find the email sign up button?” or “Are you able to quickly see the latest information from our organization?” etc. We always help our clients draft these goals as a part of the initial design process, and reusing them to guide feedback from other stakeholders is a great way to get targeted feedback.
Of course there’s no way to guarantee that you’re not going to get feedback along the lines of “I really hate the colour green” or “The woman in that photo looks too much like my evil Aunt Mabel” but hopefully that helps you to get more targeted and useful information as well, which is the feedback you can focus on.
Another framework to try to apply, but I’ll warn you this one is really tricky, is to remind your board (or other stakeholders) before they give you feedback who the target audience is (assuming your board doesn’t match your target audience). And, if you’re comfortable enough with your board you may want to even explicitly remind them that they are not the target audience, or that they are not exclusively their target audience. A quick, gentle reminder along the lines of “Remember our website is one of the primary ways that our core program users, who are youth between the ages of 13-19 who typically access the internet from home on highspeed connections…” etc. is a great way to just help get people thinking about more than their personal preferences.