Ep 319 | Iteraction Cycyles in Design_Nervous System in brain
1 Nov 2025 · 4 min
Designers should iterate in cycles after launch, not just before. A five-step process—observe, reflect, refine, retest, record—trains both your brain and your users' brains to learn. Fix one thing at a time and validate with real people.
According to Nielsen Norman group, 85% of the UX improvement happens after the first launch. Yet most of the designers quit iteration process. Once they start dribbling and shoots looking good, they start doing it. That's like your brain learning one skill and refusing to practice it again. Can I tell you something? Why do so many projects stall and after the version 2 or version 1 or something? Because teams chases for perfection instead of progress and leave the feedback what the users are telling real designer matures only when they start understanding and accepting that the real feedback of the user is important. You need to build more versions and it's just the first version is a iteration for us. Second version is iteration for us. Today we are going to discuss why iteration cycles is very important for designers as well as the user to start firing neurons inside your brain. Okay, in this podcast I'm going to be helping you with the five steps how we can increase the learning loop for your user. Welcome guys. Welcome to this episode. Thank you for staying tuning here in Design for Change podcast. If you have not subscribed to our podcast, please do it and you will get a lot of content like this. Okay, now I'm going to be making this very short podcast for you. What is mean by iteration cycle and how you can do it in five steps? First of all, when you're creating a project, first you need to observe, okay, the step one, collect the honest users feedback and not their opinions. There is a huge difference between reaction and opinion. Many people get confused here while they do the UX research process. They try to understand how it looks good. Oh, it looks great. Ah, it looks worst. No, this is not exactly the opinions what you have to collect. You need to understand the real expression and the reaction. This is called observation. This is one of the golden skill of a designer. Step two, reflect. You need to spot the patterns by using some affinity mapping, spider trigram analysis or YY analysis or maybe root cause analysis. Is to find out the patterns based on this reactions what made the user really get confused or what made them happy. How we can able to sustain that. This is very important to map up the pattern. Third, refine it. Once you have found out this, try fixing one thing at a time. Which is the one thing which is creating all this problem. So you cannot solve all the 25 issues. What you figure it out. You have to fix only one thing which is blocking the whole value. This is very important. The fourth is retest it. Validate this tweak after every 3 users or 10 users or 20 users and 60 users you will get to see the patterns which is coming as a right. That means your solution has been used by the user. The feedback you've understood what from the user is perfectly good. Fifth is recorded. This is very important for you and your entire team or maybe the people who are going to develop this product in the future. They will be not able to go through this whole cycle of learning process. They will just build on top of that. Documenting insights will create an iteration memory inside your team's intelligence. So the five step process to learn the looping system is observe, reflect, refine, retest and record. Can I tell you something? Brain learns only based on iterative cycles and looping system inside our nervous system of the body. Same like that in your design system in your design project or design product development lifecycle. You need to have this iteration cycle in your process or else you will not be able to complete a project. Iteration is not a rework guys. It's a neural growth inside the brain of our body that's the same happens for your design. Every cycle strengthens your product reflexes. So this week pick one flow and loop it twice and try to see how we can able to improve in this podcast or YouTube, wherever you're listening. DM Evolve in order to get a free iteration template. And you will get a surprise gift from our team as well. And you can join in someone of our Sunday session where I can even review some of your user flows, some of your portfolios and give you real time feedback. Because great designers don't release products, they train them to think, think, think a lot. Thank you so much guys. In this podcast you must have understood the importance of iterative design and iterative cycles and loops. In the next podcast we'll see some other topic as well. Thank you so much. If you find this most valuable, give me a best star rating in Apple and Spotify and subscribe this for further episodes and keep sharing with the other people as well till take care. All the best. Bye bye.