I recently published an article called Active Feedback: Requesting Feedback To Meet Needs. This article is a companion article talking about a more objective form of feedback: Passive Feedback. While active feedback is great for involving people in the product development process, passive feedback should be used to validate ideas, assumptions or guesses that have been made.
By implementing passive feedback you will be able to make more informed decisions, guide others more effectively, and increase your personal effectiveness.
What is Passive Feedback?
Passive feedback is observed without the participants conscious knowledge. Because the participant has no conscious knowledge of the observer, communication channels are one way. There is no back and forth communication between observer and observed. Passive feedback works best when there are known goals. These goals must be measurable. Measure goals in rates rather than absolutes. This tends to be more objective. Passive feedback is most effective when it is applied across a large sample group. Because of this it is far more quantitative than qualitative.
Why Would I Want To Use Passive Feedback Techniques? Shouldn’t I Just Talk To People?
There are several problems with relying solely on active feedback mechanisms. The first is the problem of self-selection. Any group or individual which selects itself is inherently biased. Keep in mind, bias may be either negative or positive. Either way it is still a bias. This is one reason why you get called for jury duty. Calling jurors reduces bias, and bias increases inaccuracies.
The second is that people don’t really know what they want. Jakob Nielsen even went so far as to write an article called First Rule of Usability? Don’t Listen to Users. People can be horrible at knowing they have a problem, much less how to explain it! We make excuses, saying that “It’s just how it is.” or “Well, it isn’t really that important.” Often, the observations that hide behind these phrases are critical!
How Do I Do Passive Feedback?
Set a Goal!
The best first step in any passive feedback technique is you must identify a specific goal. How do you do that? I’ve compiled a short list of goal setting techniques.
Keep it Simple. Don’t use all kinds of fancy language. Clearly identify what you want people to accomplish.
Keep it Boolean. Yes or no. Is or isn’t. Either they accomplished the goal or not.
Keep it Important. I like the concept of benefit driven metrics. Andrew Chen tells us to measure lives saved, not life preservers sold.
Measure it!
Until you are measuring a goal, it is useless. I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s useless to pontificate about what things you’d like to measure if you never measure anything. Use an appropriate method to measure the goal. Is your goal see how many customers problems were solved when they called in? You may need to use a survey package like Survs or Google Forms. Want to see how many people click a link on a webpage? Use Google Analytics or Mint or some other analytics package to figure out if people are doing what you want them to. Want to measure your user interface? Mixpanel offers some great tools.
Analyze It!
The best way to analyze a goal is to ask questions. Does the goal actually measure what you wanted to measure? What is the conversion rate? Conversion rate is the number of people who are exposed to an opportunity to meet the goal compared to the number of people who actually do it. By asking questions you begin to challenge your assumptions. Identifying and then challenging assumptions is possibly the most critical aspect of eliminating observer bias.
Make a Decision!
Now that you have gathered information, you have come to the point where you must choose to either do something, or let it be. You can decide which direction this new knowledge will take you. By being objecting, you can verify that you are on the right or wrong path and actually make a good decision.
Now What?
Now you must apply what you have learned. If you combine active and passive feedback techniques you will more effectively meet customer, employees, and even personal needs. You will become more objective, which means that decisions you make will improve in quality.
We all need to be better at making decisions, I assure you.