Role: Senior Product Designer
Industry: Electronics
Duration: 6 months
Outcome: Increase customer engagement in satisfaction surveys by providing more data that helps improve service.
Context
A team was about to launch an MVP for a customer satisfaction experience.
Because of tight deadlines, usability validation had been removed from the project plan.
Despite the pressure to deliver quickly, we believed that validating a key design assumption before launch would reduce the risk of making the wrong decision.
The Assumption
We assumed that a color-coded Likert scale would make it easier for customers to evaluate the quality of the service they had received.
It sounded reasonable.
But we didn’t know whether it was actually true.
My Role
As Senior Product Designer, I proposed and conducted a lightweight validation study that could fit within the project’s limited timeline.
What We Learned
Instead of making decisions easier, colors unintentionally influenced participants’ choices.
Users consistently reported that letters felt more neutral than numbers and colors, allowing them to focus on their real perception of the service rather than on visual cues.
We also ensured the study included a color-blind participant, reinforcing accessibility considerations from the beginning.
Outcome
The interface was redesigned before release, replacing colors and numeric scores with a neutral letter-based scale.
A small validation effort prevented a flawed interaction from reaching production and increased the team’s confidence in an important product decision.
I wrote and publish about this process in the portuguese page of uxdesign.cc too.
Priscila Alcântara 