How to Capitalize on Feedback Opportunities
With an increasingly competitive and fast-paced market, companies are realizing that they need to focus more on providing an excellent user experience in order to set themselves apart. User experience research has gained prominence, promising to engage with users, understand their needs and pain points, and provide recommendations on how to tweak designs, features, and products to better fit user needs and wants.
Feedback is the building block for research. Without quality user feedback, researchers cannot provide recommendations to drive better and more efficient business. So businesses are progressively investing in gathering and collecting feedback. There are a variety of ways companies can collect user feedback, such as:
· 1:1 research sessions (in-person or remote)
· Client conferences
· Roundtables and regularly scheduled check-ins
· Inviting clients into your office for tours and conversation
· Onsite visits
· Feedback opportunities embedded in the product
Each of these methods has its own benefits and drawbacks, and it’s best to use a balanced and thoughtful combination of them.
One-on-one research sessions are a staple of user experience research. Researchers work with product owners and designers to establish research goals and determine the scope of a study, and then sit down with users either in-person or over the phone to discuss a topic in depth. One-on-one sessions are easier to control and keep on track than focus groups, and they allow researchers more flexibility to engage participants individually and probe particular areas of interest.
Despite their benefits, these sessions do have some drawbacks. In-person sessions are usually conducted at the researcher’s office, which takes participants out of their natural environment and puts geographical limitations on the participant pool. Participants often interact with prototypes instead of actual products, using fake or prepopulated data instead of their own, which can impact the validity of the findings. In-person sessions also require participants to remember, recall, and recount their experiences, which can be mentally taxing and inexact. Warming participants up by providing context and easing them into the topic through progressive questioning can help stimulate their memory. Providing co-creation, design, or card sorting activities can also help participants demonstrate their inner thinking and values, which can reveal more authentic results.
Phone interviews can begin to solve the issues of geographical limitations and taking participants out of their natural settings, however key non-verbal cues and clues are lost during phone interactions. Participants might also suffer from expert blindness over the phone, omitting key details that seem too obvious or mundane for mention. For example, if a participant says she looks at her calendar, she may neglect to mention that she looks at her calendar designated for compliance deadlines, not the cat calendar for personal events, or the landscape calendar for benefit and payroll schedules.
Another opportunity to collect feedback from users is holding a variety of client conferences across the country. Clients in each region are invited to their local conference where they can learn about the latest products and features, ask the experts for assistance or advice, and participate in user research sessions. Research sessions can include one-on-one interviews or focus groups. They allow researchers to talk with real users who are engaged and knowledgeable, and they can help you conduct research with hard-to-find user types. Participating in research helps clients feel more involved in the product development process, feel that their voices are being heard, and increase buy-in. However, these conferences are quite expensive and time-consuming to organize and execute, so they are often relatively infrequent and more of a supplemental research opportunity.
In addition to periodic conferences, roundtable or regularly scheduled check-ins allow clients to recurrently provide feedback. These meetings could be monthly or quarterly lunch meetings, phone calls, or even webinars. Similar to conferences, a variety of clients come together in a focus group style to reflect on their experiences and provide up-to-date feedback. These meetings can be surprisingly therapeutic to clients and allow them to interact and connect with each other, sharing their tips, tricks, and advice. Having leadership and employees from your own company participate and hear clients’ feedback can really increase empathy, which can improve business decisions and product development. In-person meetings can increase participant engagement and mental presence, while phone calls or webinars could allow participants to share their screens to illustrate their reasoning and issues more clearly and concretely. A strength of this method is also a weakness though. This method makes clients feel like their voices are continuously being heard and valued, however by talking to the same clients each time, you cannot hear new voices or a variety of client sizes, types, and industries. Additionally, you could only talk to clients using repeated roundtables, which could limit your participant pool and prevent you from talking to ideal or target users.
Another way to engage different clients is establishing a day each week that clients are invited into your office for a tour, lunch, and a feedback session. Client Relationship Managers or Product Owners can present new products and features, discuss the product development lifecycle to set realistic timelines and functionality expectations, and gather end user feedback. By opening your doors to clients, you invite them to learn more about your process and be a part of the development process. This can increase engagement and buy-in and possibly even increase clients’ empathy and understanding of the various limitations and challenges you are facing as a company. You can connect human faces to your product and establish more authentic and fruitful relationships with clients. Of course there are drawbacks to this approach as well. These tours and meetings are generally a one-time thing, geographical limitations create a smaller pool of participants, and this requires clients to commit to coming into your office and spending at least half a day with you.
A more flexible and ideal way to gather valid feedback from users is onsite visits. During an onsite visit, members of your team can travel to participants’ offices and observe them in their natural workplace setting. Onsites allow more flexibility in participant type and location. Depending on your budget, you can fly anywhere to participants’ offices, and you can visit clients or non-clients. Visiting offices allows you and your team to get insight into daily work flows, look at real documents and tools they use, and see things that might be overlooked or forgotten during remote or in-person interviews. Onsite visits also allow you to bring a team of non-researchers such as product owners, designers, developers, and even leadership into users’ turf to obtain a greater understanding of how your products are actually used and gain tremendous empathy for users’ pain points and daily processes. However, onsites can be time-consuming and expensive. Travel to a variety of locations adds up, and it is best to spend at least a half day at each client site. Additionally, it’s important to avoid getting wrapped up in what one particular participant says and getting an overly narrow view. Thus it’s usually best to conduct a cluster of onsites with a variety of participant company sizes, locations, and industries.
A final method to collect user feedback is to build continuous feedback opportunities into your product. Meaning when users are actively using your product, they can submit feedback in real time. This is ideal because users aren’t asked to recall their experiences at some later date out of context. Besides onsites, this is the most authentic and realistic method of collecting feedback. It’s best to acknowledge user feedback as you receive it, even if it’s just an auto-generated email after each comment or at the end of each quarter thanking them for their comments.
However, you have to determine how best to gather and utilize this continuous flow of feedback, which is more complicated than it might seem. First you need to decide who will be in charge of monitoring the feedback and who will be responsible for sharing and acting on the feedback, as you can amass a lot of data in a short timeframe. You have to make sure to take each piece of feedback with a grain of salt. You don’t want to get caught up in one-off comments that only apply to one company since issues could arise from a variety of unrelated or situation specific things such as clients’ IP restrictions, system/internet configuration, or product configuration. It will be hard to engage respondents in discussion and probe deeper into their feedback statements, which can make it hard to root out “legitimate” feedback versus client-specific issues. Additionally, you may receive a bunch of random snippets of feedback that are not focused, directed, or related. This makes it hard to amass sufficient amounts of feedback on one topic or feature and makes it hard to act on feedback if it does not relate to what your development and design teams are working on.
Thus there are a variety of ways to collect valuable feedback from users related to your current projects and products. Each method has pros and cons that you must consider given your goals, resources, and timeframe, and ultimately it is best to use a combination of these methods. Once you select your method and gather feedback, make sure to sincerely thank your participants for their feedback in order to maintain good relationships and open lines of communication. Explain the current projects you’re working on and how participants’ feedback will be used and will positively impact the product. And always make sure you are realistic and honest in setting expectations about the impact, timeline, and feasibility of their feedback and suggestions as well.
Summary
1:1 research sessions (in-person or over the phone)
Pro — in-depth feedback, opportunities for probing, get variety of respondents/industries/companies
Con — not in natural context, usually prototypes and fake data, in-person limits geographic pool of participants
Research conferences
Pro — get real users to give you feedback, helps them feel more engaged and involved, increases client buy-in
Con — infrequent, expensive and time-intensive to plan and execute, limited to clients
Roundtables
Pro — increase buy-in and engagement, feel like their voices are heard, real users, increase leadership and employee empathy!
Con — same clients over and over again, lack of diversity, limited to clients
Weekly client visits
Pro — increase buy-in and engagement, real users
Con — infrequent, one-time thing generally, smaller pool of participants — geographical limits
Onsite visits
Pro — contextual research, get insight into real work flows, see real documents/tools, can see things that might be overlooked in phone/in-person interviews
Con — time-consuming and expensive, need to visit a variety of sites — avoid getting tunnel vision and only thinking about one client’s needs
Continuous feedback opportunities built into product
Pro — in context and real time, no dependency on memory
Con — issues could arise from a variety of things (IP restrictions, system/internet configuration, ADP products and configuration, etc.), lots of data to sift through, random snippets — not focused/directed, may not fit into what Dev and UXD are working on
