How to build better digital products with continuous feedback cycles?
Looking to build better user experiences? It’s time to stop passively observing your analytics and start engaging your users. Here is why user engagement is the new key to build innovative experiences. It all starts with user feedback.
Whether you’re a Product Owner, VP, manager, or UX designer building better products is the #1 responsibility that lies in your hands. To make decisions, product-oriented professionals need data, you know that already.
The data you can use in your daily job is either operational (analytics) or experiential (feedback).
For this first story, we’ll focus on how UX-data (Users + Experience data) can boost any product. And it doesn’t involve tracking every action your users do.
First things first, what’s the problem with Analytics data?
The limits of User Operational Data (User Analytics)
Don’t get me wrong, whether you are using Mix Panel, Google Analytics, Heaps, or Hotjar to measure operational data around your product, it’s great. The reports you get out of these platforms are keys and deliver real insights on product performance. However, there are a couple of issues for any product-oriented professional will quickly notice. I’m sure you are aware of them already. Let’s take an example.
Paul is a product manager running an 8-people product team for a B2B web application in Seattle. With Google Analytics, Paul sees behavior changes based on past updates. For Paul, it’s easy to see his users’ interests and behaviors but with operational data, Paul will never understand why people are taking certain actions over some other actions in the application. Paul reads data through beautiful charts but Paul has a very hard time predicting what to develop next just by looking at past datasets.
Here are the limits of operational data:
- It’s mostly reactive data. Analytics are a reflection of past improvements and updates. It’s not proactive and won’t predict the future for you.
- It’s easy to spot patterns mixing cohort charts and user attributes and events but you never get to the why.
- Therefore, it’s hard to connect the dots, by basing all product growth on analytics, you never get the full user story. Why do they use the product, what’s the pain point, what do they need next?
- Analytics is also about tracking people. It surely helps in providing a better end-user experience, nevertheless, Google Analytics and Mix panels are not your go-to solution to build longterm relationships with your fellow users…
Consequently, operational data is crucial for the product-building process but it also has some considerable limits. That’s where experience data joins the party!
6 Benefits of User Experience Data (User Feedback)
- Engage users. Be proactive and don’t wait to get a review on your application or a churned user, asking for feedback on the best way to show that your team care and the user’s feedback has an impact on the product he’s using.
Example: ask for feedback 48 hours after signup or right after checkout. - Measure experience KPIs. NPS (what is an NPS?) is a good start but can be extended to specific metrics for every app section. Perfect to get the perceived value of your product regarding certain features.
Example: sign up process, application speed, support quality, ease of navigation… - Get better insights. Don’t rest on your laurels, measuring experience KPIs is great but you can ask follow-up questions to get down to the real why (5 whys).
Experience data is about turning the user’s voice into data-intelligence to improve and grow your product faster.
Example: if a user rated your ease of navigation 2/5, ask a follow-up question to know which area blocked them. The more data you get, the more patterns you will bring to light. - Get to know your audience. One thing experience data delivers well are insights about people using your product.
Example: get information about how the user heard about your product or what problem they’re trying to solve. - Contextualize information. Another thing that is really easy to do in digital products and nearly impossible in physical ones is attaching the context to the responses. Making the data a lot more relevant and that’s where patterns start to show up.
Example: attach the application version, account type, country, device… - Set up a continuous improvement cycle mindset. By engaging users, measuring experience KPIs and getting user-driven key insights by listening to your users; not only will you provide value for your users but you also change your team’s mindset. From getting better analytics to making users happier by building what they need most.
Example: measure onboarding satisfaction from 1 to 10 over 3 weeks.
How to get experience data?
Well, it’s not that easy. You’re already doing it, in one form or the other. Problem is, it’s a mess.
In this section, we will see how to collect proactive and organized user feedback that delivers maximum experience data for you and your team.
Using surveys. Wait. What... Really? Yes. Surveys suck because no one likes them, they’re boring, outdated and have a very low response rate. And let’s be fair. How many surveys do you reply to every week? If you’re a typical person, 0.
However, surveys are proactive, perfect to measure experience KPIs, and get insights and help you know your audience. So with a couple of tweaks, surveys can deliver amazing value!
How do we re-invent boring surveys into highly engaging forms that are: fast, personalized, automated, and deliver more than an Excel file?
4 steps.
Step 1 — Figure out the right distribution channels to engage better
When it comes to digital products, the most performing channels are quite obvious and the pannel of options is quite limited as QR codes, for example, won’t do the trick here…
You have two options and you don’t have to choose, you can use both. How wonderful?
Option A. Using messaging channels. Most commonly emails, SMS, or engagement platforms like Intercom. Trigger specific Feedback email after events you define with your team (registration, onboarding, upgrade…). These emails can be automated by your dev team or using any customer management platform like Intercom, Sendgrid, Mailchimp, or CRM.
Option B. Directly in your web or mobile application. Whether using a dynamic widget or by embedding a feedback form right into the application. For this one, you need a developer to integrate it, but nothing more than a simple copy/paste on his side. Also, when integrated, you can dynamically change the question from your feedback tool any time later on. More details in the next section.
In both options, it is key to get feedback at the right time.
Examples: after signup, after onboarding, after an upgrade, after 2 weeks…
Step 2— Define and measure product experience KPIs
First, define what needs to be measured in terms of user experience in your product. To be defined by you and are very specific to your product. They range from product components to value proposition. The first advantage of experience KPIs is to get a pulse of the overall satisfaction, as you will give the user the chance to rate different aspects of your product. The second one is that KPIs are easy to measure over time (VS open text questions). Then, in whatever survey tool you’re using, create scale/slider/stars question types to measure them easily.
Some examples: Ease of navigation, Checkout experience, Onboarding experience, Ease to create X, NPS, Ability to get more Y using our product, reliability, speed, support quality...
Step 3— Create interactive questions that get real insights
Don’t fall in the 45 questions surveys trap. That was terrible in 1999, it’s still the same today. No one likes it. You will get a poor completion rate, users will avoid it at all cost and you won’t get any insights due to the low response rate. Make it interactive!
Here are 7 tips to build interactive surveys that will deliver more responses, hence more insights:
- Polish the design. Add your logo, branding, and make sure that the style matches your style so the user doesn't feel lost.
- Limit to 7 visible questions. Make it short and use logical conditions to create as many unique paths as possible. So when a user rates a KPI like “Overall experience” to 1/5, you then ask “What is running the experience most?”, “What is not working well for you?” or “What should we improve to make your experience better?" — Bad speed, bugs, support… Also, avoiding text questions will dramatically improve your completion rate.
- Don’t ask for the data you already have. Don’t ask for the user email, name or device he used as this information is already available on your end, just attach it to the form using attributes.
- Use rewards if needed. Not enough responses? Use rewards to get more answers, you have three types of reward:
- Gifts. Like Amazon vouchers, you want to be careful with these as you need to manage the probability to get it and they don’t really improve the users' loyalty.
- Social commitment. Whether making a donation to plant a tree every X responses or to a local charity.
- Loyalty coupons. These are excellent for products, by offering coupons on your premium offers, you get more responses but also more loyal premium users. It’s a win-win. - Close the loop. At the end of the survey, don’t leave the user on “Thanks.”, it’s time to push a specific action, redirect to the support if unhappy, leave a testimonial if delighted by the product, or simply boost your newsletter with a simple call-to-action at the end.
Step 4 — Plan for action
Now that you have experience data, spot patterns, and turn them into key decisions. You now have powerful reports and insights about users' expectations. Use these insights to prioritize the next features to build in your products. Finished? Nope. It’s a cycle, do it again, and again, step by step you will see your product KPIs evolve and your analytics look better thanks to experience data and improvements you’ve done.
How to scale User Experience Data?
One major problem of experience data is its inability to be scaled. You cannot do 100 daily user meetings or weekly market research studies. But you can get analytics every day computed in nice beautiful charts.
So, how do we scale User Experience data?
First, automation is the cornerstone. Stop sending punctual surveys every quarter or year. Define the right moments and automate feedback collection by sending or showing in-app the right form to the right person.
Some examples: sign up + 7 days, sign up + 2 months, checkout + 24 hours, item created + 2 days, support contacted + 24 hours, account downgraded + 2 hours. Of course, don’t use them all, parsimony is key.
Second, integrations in your existing workflows will make it a daily habit. Automatically create a new Jira issue, Trello card, or Monday.com task when certain feedback is received and tagged. Get Slack notifications when bad feedback is received, notify your support team when a detractor is detected on the go. These are few examples in a list of endless possible integrations with your daily tools stack.
Sound goods, but my devs’ roadmap is full for the next 321 years. How do I do it? Good question, glad you asked. Platforms like Zapier, Intergromat, or Automate.io make sending emails, connecting tools, and building integrations a matter of minutes that will save you countless hours on a monthly basis.
Also, embedding a Feedback form in your application is nothing more than a copy/paste in your application, and once integrated it’s entirely flexible. So, you can change its content over time with no change from your developer. Being much more flexible than asking your developers to build the form directly in-app.
Last but not least, to scale experience data, you need the right Feedback platform. As of today, you have 3 options:
- Survey tools.
Pros: easy to create and free, perfect for one-off research
Cons: hard to brand, terrible user experience, hard to automate, no feedback management.
Tools: SurveyMonkey, SurveyGizmo, Typeform, Google form… - Experience management platforms.
Pros: can do everything and is fully integrated with your customer journey.
Cons: super expensive (>$20k), hard to set up, not flexible.
Tools: Qualtrics, Medallia. - Feedback management platforms.
Pros: support multi-channels, all feedback in one place, easy to set up and affordable.
Cons: limited to feedback management
Tools: Feedier, Mopinion, or Usabilla.
Make sure to choose one where you can engage users easily, measure product KPIs, and ask follow-up questions to get quality insights.
Of course, as part of the Feedier team. Feedier can manage all these aspects and it was built exactly for that very purpose: replacing boring surveys and making the user experience easy to collect and scale. If you want to give it a try, it has a freemium model so you can start to collect quality feedback for Free:
→ Check out our Feedier landing page to make sure it matches your requirements.
Looking for a similar article on team feedback? Let me know!
