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I like .... I wish .... What if ....

Gathering effective feedback

Giving and receiving feedback is an essential, but often very challenging part of the design process. How do we help people give authentic, informative, and useful feedback? How do we make sure the feedback we receive is specific enough to be helpful?

The "I like, I wish, What if...." activity helps you and your team:

  • Quickly collect and categorize key feedback,
  • Foster participation in the design process,
  • Facilitate meaningful, constructive, and creative discussions.
Notebook iconWith your team: I like, I wish, What if

I like, I wish, What if....

  1. Share a prototype of something you are working on.
  2. Ask each participant to provide feedback, starting their sentences with "I like" "I wish" or "What if....".
  3. As themes emerge, look for opportunities to ask follow-up questions and bring more specificity to the feedback. In particular, help participants turn their "I wish" statements into "What if....?" statements.

Tips

  • You can use the template from the Build Something Toolkit to help organize your notes. You may even want to provide one of these sheets for each participant!
  • You can use this activity with your team, or with users as a part of user testing.
  • Collect and respect all ideas shared. Expect and encourage divergent perspectives. You will have a chance to work through the feedback after the activity!

CC BY 4.0, Brecher Cook, D., & Worsham, D. (2018, April). Adapted from: Stanford d.school. Design Thinking Bootcamp Bootleg.

Once you have had a chance to review the feedback and identify themes, create a revised prototype. Work on incorporating feedback when you can, but don't worry if you are not able to incorporate every piece of feedback into the next prototype. Sometimes feedback is contradictory, unclear, or even out of scope for the learning outcomes you are working on. Do your best, but also don't feel that you need to add new learning outcomes. You can always recommend that some of the feedback be incorporated into a future project. For now, work on creating an updated and improved prototype that responds to key themes in the feedback you have received so far.

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