For all P.C. (politically correct) purposes, I am not promoting skinning a cat. I work for a veterinary company, I am certainly not going to condone harming animals in any way.

But the headline did get your attention. ha ha

For the feature I am currently designing, pictured above, I used a variety of research methods to gather user feedback.

• Interview users about how they use the smartphone app.
• Observe users on how they operate the smarphone app.
• Mock up an interface, and ask users questions about the design.
• Create a clickable prototype to see if users understand how to operate the feature.
• Observe QA to see technical of UI issues that arise in testing environment.
• Be prepared to iterate once the feature has been released to make improvements.

User feedback is key. Don’t design in a bubble and assume you understand your user’s mental model. After talking to several users, and observing their behavior, I learned a lot of the assumptions I had were wrong. So talking to users early helped me to build a better product early, before it got too far in to the code. I encourage you to always run your design ideas by at least one person, very early in the process.