Whenever you create something, you create it with the user in mind and to specifically satisfy your user’s wants and needs. But how do you understand your user’s wants and needs? By using insight to create Point of View (P.O.V) statements of course.

I’ve talked frequently about how designs should be created with the user in mind, and how important it is to gather the feedback of your users since you’re designing for them. So before we talk about about how to get feedback, let’s let The Interactive Design Foundation clear up what kind of feedback we’re looking for,

A Point Of view (POV) is a meaningful and actionable problem statement, which will allow you to ideate in a goal-oriented manner. Your POV captures your design vision by defining the RIGHT challenge to address in the ideation sessions. A POV involves reframing a design challenge into an actionable problem statement.

If you’re wondering where you can find p.o.v statements in the real world look no further than reviews. Every time you go to purchase or download something and read the reviews to see if the product is worth your time you’re reading somebody’s point of view statement.

Let’s look at an app I’m very familiar with as an artist: Procreate. The app Procreate already has a lot of information about it even before you click to read the reviews. It has 4.5/5 Stars, 7.76k Ratings and is #1 in Entertainment.

Clicking on the reviews button it’s easy to find the positive things that people say about the app. Since the app is one of the most (if not the most) popular drawing app today, it’s not difficult to see the praises for the app. Most of these users explain in their feedback statements that their wants and needs are all being met.

Next it’s important to look into the negative reviews of your design. When creating anything, it cannot get better unless there are people that explain how you’re failing them, that’s the only way to improve! And even an app as popular as Procreate experiences some negative reviews from time to time. As seen in the review, a user is not having their desires and needs met. Note how they offer no constructive way to solve these problems, which users do in the next category, constructive criticism.

The best feedback that a user can give is in the form of constructive criticism. This type of statement has the user explaining that they might not be having their desires and needs fulfilled completely, but they have a few solutions to how those needs can be met in the future. These statements are more helpful than positive ones and should be taken very seriously, they’re the only surefire way to improve!

As seen above the Procreate team even took the time to respond to this user’s critique and is taking them very seriously. P.O.V statements are the best way to understand and reach out to your audience. All P.O.V statements are comprised of user feedback and takes everything the users need, desire and want into one big sentence that usually sounds like this: X needs Y because Z. So for example Procreate’s P.O.V statement could sound like this: Users who are new to drawing need an easy to operate drawing application because complex systems are difficult to understand.

Listening to your audience through P.O.V statements and their feedback is a vital part of the design process. To read more about P.O.V statements and feedback from apps you can check out the rest of my report here: APP POV