Article

Udesh Jadnanansing
Udesh Jadnanansing 15 August 2017

How to use visual feedback for web design

Creating or enhancing your website can take a lot of time and effort, especially when you factor in user feedback. The process involves lots of emailing back and forth, revisions to pages, and meetings among designers and developers as well as various other teams within the company. Well, at least that’s how it used to be done.

Luckily, today there are various types of visual feedback tools on the market that enable web designers and developers to establish and optimise their websites.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, let’s start off by talking about what visual feedback actually is. Visual feedback, also known as usability feedback, is a method that allows the user to pinpoint particular page elements on a webpage that require improvement in some way. The strategy used to collect and analyse this feedback, however, varies depending on the goal of the user. For example, are you going to use it purely for web design or to better understand the online customer experience?

In this blog, we will look at how to use visual feedback for web design by addressing common issues businesses experience online.

The value of visual feedback

Surprisingly, there are still web development teams out that there that struggle to recognise the value of a visual feedback tool. The belief that your customers are going to go so far as to provide you with feedback without a tool in place is heavily misguided. It would probably look something like this: the visitor must first take a screenshot of the page, open it in Paint, mark it up, save the marked up image on their desktop, and send it to your business by email with an explanation of what they see. We all know that just isn’t going to happen…

Mopinion: How to use visual feedback for web design - Highlight option on website

Using a proper visual feedback tool, your digital team can facilitate this entire process for your online visitors as well as for you and your team. From collecting this feedback using feedback forms and screenshot tools to analysing it in dashboards, sharing with colleagues and taking action, it will save you lots of time and confusion. The presence alone of these types of tools is also an incentive for your clients and/or team members to provide feedback the moment they spot an issue.



Let’s take a closer look and see if you can identify with these common issues:

Issue 1: No centralised location for website notes and markups

Spreadsheets here, emails there and a menacing pile of sticky notes in the corner. This chaotic scenario is probably a familiar one for many web designers out there. So how on earth do you keep track of it all? Often times there is someone who collects and documents all current issues on the website, puts them into an email and sends them on to whoever is responsible for fixing those issues. Tedious right? Plus this can be a very time consuming process and can also result in delayed improvements to the website and/or the launch if you’re in the pre-launch phase.

Mopinion: How to use visual feedback for web design - Post Its

Visual feedback tools enable you to pinpoint and annotate website issues right away using features such as sticky notes, highlighter features and screenshots. Many of these tools also allow you to compile and analyse all of your feedback in a project dashboard. These intuitive dashboards not only make it possible for your whole team to view the data, but users can also easily filter on particular feedback items and create reports using this software.

Issue 2: Difficulty delegating tasks and communicating with team members

Another shared issue among web developers is the lack of adequate communication between team members throughout the process. If you do not have any sort of tool in place, it’s like that your communications are carried out via email or in spreadsheet notes, which means that when you need to locate a particular item, you need to do some ‘detective work’ – e.g. searching through previous email threads or scanning various spreadsheets.

Mopinion: How to use visual feedback for web design - Email

With a visual feedback tool, the communication process is simplified. You can utilise easy-to-use search queries to locate bug reports or other particular feedback items and prioritise and assign tasks to your team members. Once an item has been updated, users can change the status so as to keep fellow team members up-to-date regarding the item they’re working on.

Issue 3: Delayed responses due to lack of real-time feedback

As previously mentioned, a more traditional way of collecting this visual feedback would be to compile all notes and comments and send them to a team member all at once. But by gathering this data and dealing with it later, you’re already putting yourself behind in your project.

Mopinion: How to use visual feedback for web design - Delayed response

Real-time data collection has recently become an integral part of most digital tools today. This especially holds true in terms of collaboration with team members as well as catering to clients. Real-time responses provide for instant interactions and can improve and speed up your workflows. For example, say you want to add a comment instructing a team member to update a particular image on the homepage of your website. With a visual feedback tool such as PageProofer, you can markup the page with a note and have that sent directly to the team member who is responsible for handling that request.

Issue 4: Identifying and determining the origin of a bug

We’ve all been there. You’ve got a list of bug reports in front of you waiting for to be fixed. But what do you do when it turns out recreating the bug yourself is even more challenging that resolving it? Sure, you can play around with it a little and ultimately you will find a solution, but it’s not always efficient to operate based on guesswork. That is why it’s important to have more details behind this feedback; details that will put you on the right track.

Mopinion: How to use visual feedback for web design - Bug report

With visual feedback, users can take screenshots or highlight where the bug is and simultaneously capture metadata such as browser type, OS, window size, screen size, etc. In other words, the origin of the bug – so that you can fix it. But sometimes even that is not enough.

The options are endless with visual feedback

I hope this article has clearly demonstrated the value of visual feedback in web design. As you can see there are various ways in which this type of feedback can accelerate and optimise the design process for web designers and there are also various tools to choose from. But did you know that it can be used for other online processes as well?

There are some visual feedback tools out there, such as my company Mopinion, that allow users to work with visual feedback in a way that provides deep insights into the online customer experience, especially when visitor volumes and the complexity of a website increase. 

Please login or register to add a comment.

Contribute Now!

Loving our articles? Do you have an insightful post that you want to shout about? Well, you've come to the right place! We are always looking for fresh Doughnuts to be a part of our community.

Popular Articles

See all
How to Review a Website — A Guide for Beginners

How to Review a Website — A Guide for Beginners

A company website is crucial for any business's digital marketing strategy. To keep up with the changing trends and customer buying behaviors, it's important to review and make necessary changes regularly...

Digital Doughnut Contributor
Digital Doughnut Contributor 25 March 2024
Read more
The Impact of New Technology on Marketing

The Impact of New Technology on Marketing

Technology has impacted every part of our lives. From household chores to business disciplines and etiquette, there's a gadget or app for it. Marketing has changed dramatically over the years, but what is the...

Alex Lysak
Alex Lysak 3 April 2024
Read more
The World Is Shrinking: 6 Degrees of Separation Is Now 2!

The World Is Shrinking: 6 Degrees of Separation Is Now 2!

Six degrees of separation is not just a party game, it's a reality. Everyone is the world is interconnected, and thanks to social media, that connectedness gets tighter and richer each day. See the research...

Scott Christley
Scott Christley 9 August 2017
Read more
10 Factors that Influence Customer Buying Behaviour Online

10 Factors that Influence Customer Buying Behaviour Online

Now is an era where customers take the center stags influencing business strategies across industries. No business can afford to overlook factors that could either break the customer experience or even pose a risk of...

Edward Roesch
Edward Roesch 4 June 2018
Read more
Cats and Dogs Boost Your Business By 300%. Here’s How.

Cats and Dogs Boost Your Business By 300%. Here’s How.

It’s the age-old question that has endured ever since the creation of the internet: are you a cat person or a dog person? Or do you love both cats and dogs? We have both dog lovers and cat lovers at Sortlist, so it...

Aline Strouvens
Aline Strouvens 27 August 2021
Read more