Incorporating Users in the Design Process

Mark Boulton wrote a post recently titled “Drupal.org, Design Iterations, and Designing in the open“. I’ve been thinking about this post for a while because at my work – Envysion – we are constantly trying to determine the best way to incorporate feedback from our users in our web application.

We certainly don’t have the number of users that Drupal does – hundreds of thousands – but we have a fair number and trying to get feedback and then incorporate that feedback is always a challenge. Drupal has solved it in a very forward thinking, web 2.0 manner by opening a twitter channel, utilizing Flickr and by using the notion of groups which in Drupal’s case is a simplified forum.

I like the way Drupal has involved the users and the methods they’ve chosen to do so and to organize the information they’ve gotten back. I’m anxious to see how Drupal changes their application in response to the feedback in order to determine the level of success.