I heard a great interview today on the radio. It was with Warren Berger about his new book Glimmer. The book is about design, specifically the impact design has on everything we do. Berger emphasized that good design is an iterative process – constantly evolving your ideas by getting feedback from colleagues and other consumers of your work.

There is an exciting application to creating the optimal site experience in the online world, and probably an obvious one to many designers – in order to remain at the forefront, it’s critical to constantly evolve and update our sites to continue engaging loyal visitors and generate new traffic.

But how do we get the most accurate picture of what our audience wants? Looking beyond site analytics and third party reviews, is there a way to engage visitors directly, not measuring them by the number of clicks, downloads or time on site, but instead by listening to what they have to say?

What if we just ask them?

“Tell me one thing I can do to improve my site for the next time you visit?”

“What topics should I write about?”

“How did you hear about our site and would you tell a friend? Why/why not?”

etc…

Make it easy for your visitors to share their thoughts and you’ll get a great complement to site analytics and the other input you may get.  One idea is to give people a simple feedback box on your site where they can share with you – make it anonymous to encourage participation (some people may be turned off if their comments are made public).

Designing, and re-designing your site experience based on ongoing feedback from the people who actually use it could be a great way to efficiently grow engagement and loyalty.

Note: the radio show was on Toronto’s Classical 96.3FM.