Better Design Feedback

Another valuable source of customer feedback can be support tickets.

They tend to be easy to search. You can scan for patterns. And you can probably review 60 plus tickets in about an hour.

The cool thing is that you know the customer is already in a habit of communicating via email. So you can usually reach out as a followup to our previous conversation and ask a related question.

Again, it’s important to make this a value added interaction.

There are a number of services that you can use to record and then replay actual user sessions on your site.

A couple of examples would be Microsoft clarity, which is free, PostHog, FullStory, and HotJar.

The cool thing about these services is that you can record sessions across multiple pages. You can see where their mouse moved. You can see where they click. You can see where they got stuck.

Another great thing about session recording is that you can automatically skip pauses. You can speed up the playback of each session. I find that you can watch a couple dozen sessions in a half an hour.

And the best part is that you can filter which sessions you watch based on where a customer clicked or how they interacted with a certain page.

I’ve found session recordings to be extremely valuable because you’re watching your users use your actual product.

Support forums can be another good source of customer feedback.

This can be similar to support tickets, but with forums, you’ll see multiple people add feedback to the same thread, which can be handy.

You can use forums to search for specific queries around areas of the app that you’re currently working on.

If your company doesn’t have support forums, or if you’re a startup just getting started, you can oftentimes still benefit from your competitors support forums. This can be a great way to discover the things that your competitors users are finding frustrating.

Inline surveys or polls within your product can be a great way to gather feedback from customers.

You’ll tend to gather the best data by not showing the poll to everyone, but by targeting exactly who you want to solicit feedback from.

There are a bunch of tools out there that allow you to do this. Or you can just code up the little surveys yourself.

A couple of different examples of surveys would be:

Inline surveys can be used for a variety of different use cases.

My suggestion is to keep them short and make sure that they are dismissible.

Beta groups are a great way to test features and get feedback prior to shipping them. Again, it’s probably best to target specific segments of users.

To solicit users, you can use a dismissible in-app banner or pop-up. You could email a targeted set of customers. You can also announce it on social media, on your blog, your podcast, or your newsletter. Users who consume these channels tend to be a good fit.

It’s helpful. If you can have a centralized staging server where beta users can preview new features.

It’s also helpful to have a slack channel or a blog where you can communicate with beta users and they can share feedback with you.

Once you have everything set up, remember to update your internal processes, to leverage this asset. As a beta list is pretty worthless if you’re never going to use it.

Another way that you can gather design feedback is by scheduling individual customer interviews.

Generally, I like to have a number of structured questions in mind before I start the call and then once you get into the call, it can be more free form.

If possible, I’ve found it handy to have someone on your team also on the call just to take notes.

I find that way, if you get stumped on a question, they might be able to answer it.

Generally in my experience, everyone who joins the call sees it as beneficial.

Interviews can be virtual over zoom or they could be onsite.

One technique that I’ve seen used is to have a regularly scheduled time slot each week. Where you’re going to schedule customer interviews. You’ll fill these slots ahead of time. And just know that each week on that day, at that time, you’re going to have a call with a customer.

The benefits of doing it this way are that:

Another option that you have to generate a stream of customer interviews is to have office hours.

Instead of proactively scheduling individual customer interviews, you can use a tool like Calendly to block out one to two hours each week. Usually in like 30 minute increments. Then advertise these time slots as office hours that anyone can sign up for.

You’re going to want to be prepared to help. Some people will sign up just to get help with something.

Doing so will likely bring in all sorts of folks.

You’re likely going to attract prospective customers, angry customers, customers seeking support, and then just randos. People coming through that just don’t make sense at all.

Other than the randos. These are all great opportunities to connect.

And while you’re helping them, you can sprinkle in a few questions of your own to help you get to clarity on some of the things you’re working on.

The idea of advisory boards is similar to beta groups, but more selective.

Customer advisory boards can be an invaluable source of feedback.

Made up of half a dozen to a dozen passionate customers. Generally hand selected and invited.

You’d create a slack channel. Where you can communicate with all advisory board members.

Why create an advisory board?

How should you compensate them?

One thing that I’ll note is that it can get awkward if you try and pay them for their time. Generally I’ll try and avoid direct compensation.

And then find creative ways to compensate them outside of cash. So:

It can be helpful to make time for concierge calls. This is when you hop on a call with a new customer and you spend about an hour with them going through and helping them get set up.

It’s good to block out time for one or two of these each week.

You can help them get set up. You can walk them through primary flows. You can answer any questions that they might have.

But it’s also a great opportunity to ask them questions.

You can also use this as an opportunity to show them a new design, or to get their feedback on a particular flow.

After the call is done, it’s good to then pass whatever you learn onto your team.

The good thing about concierge calls is that customers tend to get a ton of value out of them.

As a result, you end up feeling great.

And you get the benefit of getting design feedback from real life customers.

It’s a win-win scenario.

A/B testing is a pretty common technique in tech companies these days. That said it’s often overlooked as a form of design feedback.

A/B testing is handy. When you have enough traffic to run the test. In a reasonable amount of time. You’re testing just one single change versus another. You have the right infrastructure to run the test. And you have at least a week to run the test.

What are some common failure points for A/B testing?

Why should I A/B test?

The benefits of A/B testing is that you’re comparing apples-to-apples in the best possible way. You’re comparing one version to another in real time.

A/B testing is the best. And perhaps only way to know for sure the real impact of a change that you’re going to make.

So when should you AB test?