Getting feedback from users

When you work as a Business Analyst, important part you job is to conduct software demos and software reviews with users. User reviews can help a lot to improve quality of your product, but you need to put some effort to ensure efficiency of reviews. Here some some hints on that will help.

First and foremost, you go on those review session to hear users’ feedback, positive and negative. You want to make users tell you what they like, what functions seem to be overly complex, where performance is not up to par. You do not conduct reviews to impress users, to have them breathlessly admire features you demo. You have to come to those reviews with the only desire to hear your users and make your software even better for them.

Be prepared to hear negative feedback and do not try to defend the approach you took to implement certain feature, when users say they do not like it. If you try to defend people will immediately feel that they are wasting time with you, because you do not care about their feedback and insist on you solution, when they call it wrong. Instead, you want to understand, why they think it is a bad approach, and then propose a solution to that. Audience will appreciate your care.

Make sure that your own feedback and comments were addressed before you show anything to users. Nothing can be more frustrating on the review than hearing something that you already know. At least you need to make sure that review participants are aware that certain areas of the product you review fall out of scope of today’s session and they should not pay any significant attention to any gaps there.

Keep audience engaged during the entire review session. When someone makes a couple of comments, he feels like his mission here was accomplished and, as a result, will be less attentive, less willing to interrupt anybody to propose idea. You want to keep everyone in the game, and some tricks from presenter’s toolbox can help you with that.