Thanks a lot for the thorough post-mortem, that was super interesting.
Testers are good at identifying flaws, but bad at proposing improvements
I found this point particularly interesting as someone who gives feedback fairly often—I think I’ve previously been pretty overconfident about suggesting concrete fixes (and often feel like feedback is incomplete if I don’t suggest a fix), and this was a useful update.
fwiw, it seems like you suggesting fixes would probably usually be low-cost both for you and the person you’re suggesting the fixes too, assuming it takes you little time to write/say the ideas and the other person little time to consider them. And the person you’re suggesting the fixes too is able to just discard the ones that don’t seem useful. So I’d expect it’s often worthwhile for you to just say what comes to mind and let the onus be on the other person to decide whether and how to use your input.
(Also, I imagine you trying to suggest fixes might sometimes make it clearer what the problem you perceived was, but I’m not sure about that, and it could perhaps also confuse or distract from the real issue, so that seems a less important point.)
Thanks a lot for the thorough post-mortem, that was super interesting.
I found this point particularly interesting as someone who gives feedback fairly often—I think I’ve previously been pretty overconfident about suggesting concrete fixes (and often feel like feedback is incomplete if I don’t suggest a fix), and this was a useful update.
fwiw, it seems like you suggesting fixes would probably usually be low-cost both for you and the person you’re suggesting the fixes too, assuming it takes you little time to write/say the ideas and the other person little time to consider them. And the person you’re suggesting the fixes too is able to just discard the ones that don’t seem useful. So I’d expect it’s often worthwhile for you to just say what comes to mind and let the onus be on the other person to decide whether and how to use your input.
(Also, I imagine you trying to suggest fixes might sometimes make it clearer what the problem you perceived was, but I’m not sure about that, and it could perhaps also confuse or distract from the real issue, so that seems a less important point.)