For years, the team at xneelo have been gathering customer feedback on what would make konsoleH a better control panel. When we started designing our new control panel, we knew we had to keep these lines of communication open. For us to truly create a control panel that responds to our customers’ needs, we had to involve our customers. So that’s what we’ve done – by following an iterative design process.
What is iterative design?
In essence, iterative design is a feedback loop. Instead of designing and delivering a completed control panel, we are testing the usability of each feature, asking customers for feedback, and incorporating that feedback throughout the development process. We’re not delivering an unfinished product, but rather working with our customers on each feature so that we can learn from your feedback, and work together to create the best possible control panel. This is largely done through a volunteer user testing group.
Through customer feedback on our ‘living prototype’ (konsoleH), we knew what worked and didn’t work, and had some ideas for how to fix it. Iterative design – also known as agile design – allows us to test these ideas. It can be difficult to know whether or not something fulfils a need until we test it out in real life. With our user testing group, we get more feedback, make more changes, and build the most useful control panel together.
Why we chose an iterative design
Any design changes we make at xneelo have a simple focus: to make it easier for you, our customers, to get your work done. Customer experience is at the heart of the design process. With iterative design, our customers highlight what is truly useful, so that we don’t have to focus on those elements that have less of an impact.
It also ensures that customers are part of the creative journey from the start. The insights we get from our user testing group help us to immediately improve the current tools and features. A recent example is the creation of our Mail Admin tool: the first iteration that we released didn’t include the mailbox settings for easy sharing. Within days of releasing the tool, customers let us know that this was a critical feature, so we took this feedback on board and added the feature in the next iteration.
How it helps our customers
Quite simply, user testing and user feedback earlier in the design process leads to a better customer experience. The tools are released to our customers sooner (rather than waiting for the whole project to be complete) and the finished product is more closely aligned to what you, the customer, need.
The journey to a completed control panel is a long one – it’s an (ultra) marathon, not a sprint. But by taking an iterative approach to design, we are moving forward confident of each step we’re taking: sure that it’s what our customers are looking for.
