8 Practise Iterative Design
Philip Loosemore
Don’t just write. Design your communications by looping through the stages of prototyping, testing, and refining.
What You’ll Learn:
- What iterative design means
- How to design for the needs of readers
- How iterative design can improve your writing
Design means to plan and create something. Iterative design means to loop repeatedly through the design process, gradually refining the product through feedback.
Iterative design is common in the development of commercial and tech products:
| Pixel 3 Phone | Pixel 4 Phone | |
|---|---|---|
| Specifications (RAM) | 4GB RAM | 6GB RAM |
| Updated Features | Camera: Dual front cameras for wider view | Camera: New telephoto lens for better zooming |
| New Features | Titan M chip for more secure passwords and operating system | Motion Sense to control actions without touch |
Writers and their readers can benefit from this approach. Picture the following process:
- Draft something
- Get feedback
- Revise based on the feedback
- Get more feedback
- Revise based on that feedback
- Etc.
In the iterative design approach, you share a draft long before your project is finalized.
Get readers’ reactions to your work while you’re still developing it.
Iterative Design
Characteristics of iterative design:
- Focus on a user’s needs
- Prototype to meet those needs
- Test the prototype with users
- Refine and improve the design
Meet the Audience’s Needs: Connection First
Iterative design is all about connection. Focus on your audience’s needs, even when making an argument or disagreeing with someone.
This approach fits with any communication situation, including essay writing and public speaking.
In a debate, your opponents need several things:
- Evidence that you’ve heard and understood them, and that you are open to hearing their point of view
- Clear, direct communication of your claims and reasoning, so they in turn can understand and respond
- Accurate, credible evidence backing up your points
- Unbiased language
With that in mind, consider these critical responses to an argument made by Mark Kingwell.
In May 2020, Mark Kingwell wrote an op-ed in Canada’s Globe and Mail to argue that online education was inferior to face-to-face education (“Let’s Admit It—Online Education Is a Pale Shadow of the Real Thing”). Kingwell was responding to the rapid transition to online learning with the onset of COVID-19 that March.
Response 1
“Biased opinion coming from an institutionalized professor” (monexatb, 2020). Read the comments here.
Response 2
“Contributor Mark Kingwell may be right, but he may also just be resisting change” (Daudelin, 2020).
Read the letter here
The writer of this letter welcomes all readers, including those who share Kingwell’s view. Notice the qualifications:
- Acknowledgement of the other side (“Kingwell may be right”)
- Limitation of the argument (“he may also just be resisting change,” as opposed to something aggressive like “he’s clearly just resisting change”)
Response 3
“I teach legal studies at a community college. I recognize the necessity of online teaching to salvage the academic year. But I lament the loss of the classroom for two major reasons” (Berger, 2020).
Read the source.
The opening lines of this letter clearly establish the main point and provide a quick structural roadmap (“two major reasons”). The author also qualifies the argument and begins with context that personalizes the letter. It reaches out to readers by being clear, fair and personal.
Design your communications to meet the recipient’s needs.
How do you discover your target audience’s needs and expectations?
- When possible, just ask!
- Put yourself in a reader’s shoes.
- Analyze different readers’ likely expectations and motivations.
Prototype Rapidly
Step 1: Get it off the ground
A is a rough draft. Its purpose is to generate feedback.
Think about a target reader’s needs, then produce the quickest draft that you think fits those needs.
“Quickest” depends on the size of the project. A research project usually involves a lot of reading, exploring, prewriting, and outlining before you’re even able to make a draft.
Consider showing someone your initial ideas in note or outline form. Or write the first full draft as early in the process as you can.
The point is, the first thing a reader sees doesn’t need to be polished or fully formed.
Parallel or sequential?
In technical design, prototyping may be either parallel or sequential.
- Parallel prototyping: You offer users several versions at once (Hohl, 2017).
- Sequential prototyping: You offer one version, apply the feedback, offer the next version, and so on.
In the world of writing, prototyping usually makes more sense.
But you could offer a reader different versions of one brief section of a document. For example, you could draft two separate introductions and say to your reader, “Here are two possible intros. Which works better?”
Step 2: Give it a once-over to correct the obvious errors or gaps
It’s better to get feedback on an imperfect version early on than to put off receiving feedback.
That said, aim to provide something as error-free as possible. Don’t trip readers up with little things you can solve easily. You want them to focus on your ideas and structure more than typos.
Fix the things you can, then send it to a reader.
Original:
“Online learning has its own unique challenges however opens the doors to a larger audience” (monexatb, 2020).
Corrected:
Online learning has its own unique challenges. However, it opens the door to a larger audience.
Test Early
Get feedback early. Share a whole or partial draft. See how readers react. Find out what they understand and what they don’t.
Discover how close you are to meeting the target reader’s needs and expectations.
Let’s say you are making an argument about a contemporary issue. To know if you’re meeting readers’ needs, you require certain feedback:
Know that it’s hard to see your own work through a reader’s eyes. There is no substitute for getting feedback. Strive hard to overcome the fears we all have about sharing our written work. Feedback is one of the most valuable parts of the writing process!
Consider the following exchange, in the comments thread below an op-ed.
“The highest % of funds are spent on the capital costs for constructing large buildings” (monexatb, 2020).
“[L]argest, by far, component of university budgets is salary, not capital costs” (ToryForever, 2020).
Read the exchange here.
Here, the respondent points out a correction.
This pair of comments illustrates the kinds of things that might come up in a reader’s response to an essay draft.
Don’t write in a vacuum. Find out what readers think and have to offer.
Tips
- Get feedback early and often.
- Give readers specific questions. What exactly do you want feedback on? The language and tone? Your argument? The structure?
- If you can’t find someone to give feedback, go over your own work with a second reader’s eyes as best you can. It’s very challenging to read something of yours as if you’re not the writer, which is why feedback is so important—but it’s always worth a try.
Refine Continuously
Develop your ideas based on feedback.
Let’s go back to the last example. Imagine you’re critiquing Mark Kingwell’s criticism of online teaching and learning. You’re making the point that online teaching will save money:
ORIGINAL
“The highest % of funds are spent on the capital costs for constructing large buildings” (ToryForever, 2020).”
See the source.
Now imagine that you receive the feedback that you’ve made a factual error. You do a little bit of research and verify the feedback. How might you revise?
One option is to delete the statement entirely. But you don’t have to.
You’ll need to question your own claim that online learning will bring significant savings to postsecondary institutions. But that doesn’t mean you have to abandon your line of thinking. You just need to refine it:
FEEDBACK-BASED REVISION:
While capital expenditures are a relatively small part of postsecondary budgets, the savings brought by online learning would still be meaningful.
The revision fixes the factual error and backs the point up with a source. It improves accuracy and credibility.
This revision reverses the statement about spending, yet makes fundamentally the same point: online learning saves postsecondary institutions money. It’s a much stronger claim now that it’s research-based and qualified.
The process is
- collect feedback;
- refine your work; and
- repeat the process.
Let’s end with one more example of what iterative design can look like in the writing process.
Let’s say you’re writing a critique essay evaluating Bruce Pardy’s claim that Mental disabilities shouldn’t be accommodated with extra time on exams,” and you’re getting input from readers on various drafts. What might these iterations look like?
| ESSAY DRAFT 3 | ESSAY DRAFT 4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Critique essay—evaluates Pardy’s argument based on close analysis of his article | Research-based critique essay—evaluates Pardy’s argument based on both analysis and additional research into the topic of “student accommodation” |
| Updated Elements | Claim 1 (weakness of Pardy’s opening analogy that compares athletes in a race to students): adds additional example of a false analogy to clarify why Pardy’s analogy doesn’t work | Claim 1: adds research to solidify the claim and show alternatives to the “competitive” model of education |
| New Elements | New claim: adds a claim to address a reader’s observation of a weakness in the argument | Qualification section: adds a paragraph-length acknowledgement of the merits of Pardy’s argument |
Iterative writing is a great way to rapidly improve your work with the input of readers!
Try It!
Begin your journey with iterative design by putting users first.
Your internet bill is scheduled to jump 7% in three months, according to a recent notice from the internet provider. You’re calling to complain to customer retention. What does the first service representative you speak with need? Think it through, then compare your response to the sample answer.
Show Answer
You’re writing a letter to the editor in response to an opinion piece you disagree with. Some readers do agree with the opinion writer’s point of view and are therefore probably going to disagree with you at first. When they come to your letter, what are their needs?
Show Answer
We covered what iterative design is and how it helps you focus on the needs of your audience. We explored how iterative design is a looping process of:
- Prototyping (making something to address others’ needs)
- Testing (getting feedback)
- Refining (improving the draft based on feedback)
References
See Practice Iterative Design References
means to loop repeatedly through the design process, gradually refining the product through feedback.
A rough draft meant for getting feedback as part of the writing process (or some other process of creation).
Argument or evaluation based on evidence and a process of reasoning. The main claim of an essay is its thesis.
Logical thought process leading to a conclusion in an argument.
Correctness. An accurate statement is factual and precise.
The trustworthiness of a source. If a source is credible, we have reason to believe that it’s factually accurate and reliable.
Impartial, nonprejudiced, fair. See bias.
Labelling groups by some characteristic, usually in a prejudiced and oversimplified fashion.
A restriction or limitation on the meaning of a statement. When you qualify your argument, you acknowledge limits or opposing viewpoints.
A restriction or limitation on the meaning of a statement. When you qualify your argument, you acknowledge limits or opposing viewpoints.
Central argument or main idea of an essay.
Statements that explain why someone holds a particular opinion or believes a particular claim to be true.
Data in support of a position or argument. Can take the form of testimony, eyewitness account, analogy, statistics or quantitative data, example, and more.
A restriction or limitation on the meaning of a statement. When you qualify your argument, you acknowledge limits or opposing viewpoints.
Readers who sympathize with Kingwell may feel their viewpoint is unfairly dismissed by the unproven, generalized claim, and the stereotyping and oversimplification.