Make it Easier for People to Give You Valuable Feedback

By Sarah Doody

Today’s guest post is from Sarah Doody, a user experience guru and instructor in Femgineer’s Lean Product Development Program.

I always like to say that user experiences and products are not created in a silo. The best products are a result of collaborations between teams who are experts at what they specialize in, but also recognize the valuable feedback that each of their peers can offer throughout the process.

But you know who else has to be present to create a great product? The end customer or user.

In user experience and product design, we talk a lot about the importance of talking to users and customers in the beginning of the product development process. This helps us with market research and customer discovery where we begin to develop a deep understanding of who the user or customer will be.

Without this knowledge, it is impossible to create a successful product. You must understand your target market’s problem and how your product will provide a solution.

But after you’ve done that discovery, gone through the product development process, and launched your product … then what?

Far too often I hear about companies who do not have any data. Today, there’s really no excuse for a lack of data and analytics when it comes to a digital product.

There are two key types of data that I think are important to your product success.

First, there is the quantitative data that can be provided from tools such as Google Analytics, MixPanel, CrazyEgg, and KissMetrics. These tools provide you with analytics to understand who is using your product and how they are using it. This will help you answer questions such as:

• What keywords are people using to find my site?
• What cities are people visiting my website from?
• What is the first page (entrance page) that people visit on my website?
• What are the most popular pages on my site?
• What pages are people on when they leave my website?
• What is the breakdown of new users versus returning users?
• How long do people spend on my site?
• How many pages does the average user view on my site?

• What are some of the navigational paths that people take on my site (eg. Homepage > About > Contact” vs “Homepage > Shop > Blog > About > Contact”)

This is just a basic overview of the kind of data and analytics you can get from these tools. However, analytics are not enough. How can you gain insight into your customers’ overall user experience? What are they thinking? What are they feeling? What don’t the numbers tell you?

In user experience, every single interaction matters and to craft a great user experience, we must consider every tiny little detail. What happens when someone mouses over something on the page? What happens if someone enters wrong information into the field of a form? What happens when someone clicks inside a form field? These are commonly referred to as microinteractions.

Then, there’s microcopy, which is the text that appears as a label of a form field, or the text on a button, or a little instructional text to cue the user. Microcopy is not marketing copy or your “About Us” text. Microcopy is part of the user experience and is purposed to help guide someone through the experience with your product.

This all leads us to the second type of data that’s important to your product’s success: qualitative data, and we get that through feedback.

So what’s the simple and effective technique to getting valuable feedback?

Microfeedback is simple but very effective technique to getting valuable feedback. Its a technique where small bits of feedback are collected from the actual customers, at specific points in their interaction with your product. The biggest differentiator between microfeedback and, say, data from Google Analytics is that the data from microfeedback is provided by the users themselves.

I’ve noticed this innovative technique being used by companies to get both quantitative and qualitative feedback from the actual users.

Let’s look at a few examples so you can get a better idea of what microfeedback is and how you can collect it.

I’ve been using a food delivery service in NYC called HealthyOut. I love it because instead of showing me all the options from all the restaurants that deliver, it only shows me “healthy” options.

After I place an order on HealthyOut, I get a standard email confirmation, but I also get a confirmation via text message. The text confirmation gives me an ETA of when my food will be delivered, which is a nice touch.

But here’s the most unexpected part of the user experience. About an hour after my food is delivered, HealthyOut sends me a second text message asking me to rate my food on a scale of 1 – 5. The first time it happened, I didn’t hesitate for a second to reply back and tell them how I thought my food was because it only required me to text a number back. It was just so easy!

I thought this was a great example of how a company used text messaging to get microfeedback from me in a really non-intrusive and simple way. This feedback is super important to HealthyOut because if a meal consistently gets rated a 1, maybe this is a sign that HealthyOut should stop featuring it on their website!

Here’s another great example of microfeedback I encountered while shopping in New York City

I often shop at a store called Century21. After I checkout at the register and pay for my items, a little two-question survey comes up on the screen where you swipe your card and sign your name. The survey asks two questions:

1. How was your checkout experience (Very Good, Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory)

2. Was your cashier professional (Yes / No)

Again, these are very simple and quick questions for me to answer. More importantly, these questions are being asked at the very moment I am at the cash register. So if the cashier is awful, my survey is going to reflect that.

Now that you have a better understanding of what microfeedback is, and some examples to show you how companies with both digital and non-digital experiences have used it, here are some tips for how you can go about asking your customers for microfeedback.

1. Ask for feedback at the right time

After you identify what you’re asking for feedback about, figure out the best time to ask for that feedback within the user experience. In the case of HealthyOut, they wanted to know if I liked my food. So, they ask me about an hour after my food was delivered. Chances are, I would receive that text message shortly after I ate it and I’d remember how the food was. If HealthyOut waited until the next day, I might not be as likely to reply. And if I did reply, my answer might not be as accurate as it would be an hour after I actually ate the food.

2. Keep the answers as short as possible

Obviously, m-i-c-r-o-feedback is meant to be small. So, keep the answers very simple and short. I would stick with answers that are either yes / no or simply numerical answers such as 1 – 5. If you really want to get cute, you could use little faces or emoticons. (Sidenote: I was recently in the Dublin airport and saw an amazing example of microfeedback that used faces / emoticons instead of numbers. Read this blog post to learn more: Everyday UX: How the Dublin Airport uses microfeedback).

3. Consider the best method of delivery

Your microfeedback doesn’t have to be delivered by email. In fact, I’d encourage you to consider alternate means. Why? Because we all get too much email and chances are it will get lost in someone’s inbox. Sometimes a day or two after I take a Delta flight, they’ll email me a link to a survey to find out how my flight was. Well, you know what? I never click the link because I have no idea how long the survey will be. And, a few days after the flight, I really don’t care to tell them anymore. But if they texted me 10 minutes after my flight landed, I’d probably reply! This is why I think HealthyOut has nailed it by asking me for feedback via text message. It’s easy, and requires me to only text a single number back!

To create a successful product, it’s important to measure how people use your product or service. But, don’t forget about finding ways to measure people’s opinions of your overall experience. Gathering this feedback does not have to be complicated, expensive, or time consuming for you or the user / customer.

What if you’re not working on a product?

Well, you can still apply the technique of microfeedback to your life – the product of you.

If you are a manager, you could use microfeedback to gather insights about how your team members are doing each week. In one of my first jobs, my manager had each person on the team send an very short email every Friday that included: 3 things that went well, 3 things that didn’t go well, and 3 things to focus on the following week. This was a great way for the manager to check in without having an hour-long meeting with each person. Also, what I loved about this was that I was able to do it on my own terms. I could do it gradually throughout the week, or I could do it all on a Friday.

Or, maybe you are into running. You probably use an app to track your running progress. But the app is only giving you information that it can measure such as pace, distance, elevation. Let’s say you have a running partner or run with a run club. You could use microfeedback to get insight into your running techniques that the app can’t give you. For example, you could say to coach at the run club, “can you give me 3 tweet-length suggestions for how I can improve my stance.” The coach is probably a busy person, so be smart about how you ask for feedback. Ask for it immediately after a run. Or maybe even better, ask before so that they can be sure to watch you during the run. In my example I say “3 tweet-length suggestions”—make it easy for them, and let them know you just want a few quick tips.

So why is microfeedback so important again?

Microfeedback provides a means to gather insightful feedback at just the right moment of the experience, generating more accurate findings that will help you create an even better product or experience.

Remember the saying: garbage in, garbage out? That’s the idea with microfeedback. Asking hypothetical customers and users you recruit through a usability testing service is a good option. But the best option is to ask real users. Microfeedback ensures that you’re getting feedback from someone who’s actually engaged with your product and therefore will likely give you better feedback.

The quality of your user experience is a direct reflection of the quality of feedback you seek out. Take the time to truly design feedback into your product so that you’re asking real customers the right questions at the right times, in order to collect meaningful data you can use to inform your product decisions.

About the Author

Sarah Doody is a user experience designer, product strategist, and writer in New York City. She also publishes a popular weekly newsletter, The UX Notebook.

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