Everyone needs feedback all the time! There’s no argument there. However, if you reflect
back on your own work, there might be times when you just aren’t ready to share your
work for feedback.
So, what are the factors that influence you to seek feedback or delay feedback on your
work? This is the question we aim to explore in this study.
As feedback is a critical resource ,many tools have been developed to help users acquire
good feedback from their target users.
The challenge is making sure that users will leverage these tools at the right time so
they gather feedback when it will be most beneficial to them. Unfortunately, prior work
with users on creative online communities shows that creators often wait to get feedback
on their work and therefore may not receive the full benefit of these tools.
To understand why, we answer the following research questions
What factors influence when, how, and from whom creators seek feedback on in-progress
work? How do the factors differ between the early
and late stage of the creative process? How do the factors differ between novice and
expert creators?
Answering these questions contribute to deeper knowledge about the feedback seeking process,
especially in creative domains and can assist us in the development of innovative features
to assist creators in gathering feedback when they most benefit from it.
To answer the research questions, we began by conducting semi-structured interviews with
24 graphic, industrial, and interaction designers. The interviews went over a participant’s
strategies to make sure they got feedback at the right time, who they sought feedback
from, and difficulties they faced in gathering feedback.
We categorized topics brought up during interviews and developed a taxonomy of factors that influenced
feedback seeking behavior.
These results were used to design an online survey which was distributed to a larger population
of creative practitioners and received 96 responses.
The first category of factors that surfaced from the interviews indicate events where
creators actively sought out feedback from others. For example, many creators sought
feedback when they had created multiple alternatives and were trying to narrow down directions
or when they were shifting conceptual directions.
The second category are social factors. As the feedback needs of creators change over
the creative process, so do the characteristics of the feedback provider including the provider’s
familiarity with the design and the anticipated feedback quality from someone who is not a
designer. An intelligent creativity tool can use these factors to recommend feedback providers
based on the stage of a creative project and the perspectives they will bring
The last category is the cognitive factors which can also be considered in the design
of features for feedback seeking. For example, a self-reflection feature can ask a creator
to reflect if they have been feeling stuck, which may indicate a need for feedback.
Through deeper analysis, we found differences between the feedback seeking behavior of experts
and novices. Experts tended to plan personal deadlines to seek feedback on their work in
advance. We didn’t see this behavior as often from novices, which indicates integrating
planning tools into the creative process would be helpful to novices.
We also found that novices had difficulty in finding feedback providers who would provide
useful feedback as compared to experts. And while there are resources to get feedback
online, many of these sites emphasize professional reputation, and make it difficult for novices
to connect with others and grow their network. This is further supported as the two experts
who cited this difficulty during the interviews were freelancers and found it difficult to
expand their network.
These factors can be used to envision new class of features to cue users as to whether
they are ready for feedback. For example, a feature integrated into document processor
or other creative tool can ask the user to answer a short checklist to assess feedback
readiness and have a link to easily share the work to a feedback site or to a specific
feedback provider via email.
Tools can also highlight specific user interactions that might indicate one of the process related
factors. For example, this prototype indicates sections of a document that were changed and
whether the amount of change in that section is greater than or less than the average amount
of change in the entire document. If a user performs more edits on one section than on
others, this could indicate the user is fixated or stuck and can benefit from feedback. This
particular idea builds on existing features for tracking changes already built into many
content creation tools.
Finally, feedback tools can lower the cognitive barriers to seeking feedback by providing
examples of other creators who sought feedback and were able to improve their project. Viewing
such examples may encourage a creator to seek feedback even in circumstances where they
are hesitant to share their work.
In summary, this study provides the following three contributions to the C&C community.
First, we develop a taxonomy of process-related, social, and cognitive factors that influence
feedback seeking behavior. Next, we investigate differences in feedback seeking based on the
expertise of the creator. Finally, we demonstrate how the factors identified in the study could
enable a new class of features to foster feedback seeking behavior