User Feedback

Background

Most data-driven product development requires a period of data gathering through analytics and research. This is true for gathering useful information on new features as well. From my experience, this period of collection and processing rarely takes less than two months.

When a new feature is released, if your “product owner’s hand” is not on its pulse and you do not keep an open feedback channel with your intended users, two months may “make or break” adoption. This is especially so when your user base is not large or the feature caters to a smaller subset of more advanced users.

We wanted to address this gap, we designed and implemented a simple feedback component. The component would invite our users to provide feedback on the new feature at the moment when it counts.

If they are frustrated, we wanted to address this frustration before it blocked adoption. If they are happy, we wanted the ability to claim success.

The first step in exceeding your customer’s expectations is to know those expectations.”

Roy H. Williams

Author & founder of the Wizard Academy Institute

We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.

Jeff Bezos

Founder & CEO of Amazon

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning

Bill Gates

Known as Co-founder of Microsoft and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

My Role

Product Owner – Growth Design

My role in this project was to

Define the need for the feedback feature and advocate its priority
Work with the design and product teams to expose the different data and UX requirements
Work with the design team on a solution
Determine feasibility with tech and product teams
Work closely with the development to on the implementation

Product and Business Objectives

Feedback from Immediate user experience

Get valuable and meaningful information from the users while the experience is still fresh in their minds.

Engage the users with the feature's success

Establish with the users that their feedback is valued. Communicate that they are partners in the "evolution" of the feature.

Learn more about the feature and its users

Enable quick and efficient learning from the users as they share frustrations and ideas.

Fast and efficient feature iterations

Allow for quick iterations to improve the design and to capture flaws that escaped testing.

Allow timely action by Customer Success Team

Allow the team to promptly address the users' frustrations. Open a channel for a more direct "conversation" with the users.

Collect CST scores for new features

Provide product and design teams with a tool to evaluate the relative success of new features.

Design

The Pattern – User Feedback Form

We found the “User feedback form” to be the most suitable UX pattern for our needs. The typical features of the pattern:

And my own, which it felt was critical to our case:

The Elements

Design approach

The design team’s hopes for this feature were:

To learn as much as possible as quickly as possible about the new feature from our users as they are “experiencing” it. This feedback would inform the next iterations of the feature.
Quick feedback from users may help us capture bugs and UX issues missed during testing (there always are) before these impact adoption. It will allow us to communicate directly with the users (to follow up, gather more input, damage control, and learn) and