Even the most prepared web apps can miss the mark on the user experience (UX)—that’s what makes user feedback so invaluable to any application’s continuous improvement and achieving business growth for your organization.
What You’ll Learn
In this user feedback guide, you’ll learn what continuous improvement entails, what different types of user feedback you can gather, how the different kinds of feedback can help with refining your cloud-based app, and the common roadblocks of gathering feedback and how to fix them.
What is Continuous Improvement for Web Applications?
Continuous improvement is both the ongoing process of enhancing your web application over time, performing regular assessments of your application, identifying areas that require further adjustment, gathering user feedback, and implementing changes.
But iterative improvements are not just about fixing problems that users report. This kind of agile practice keeps a development team ready to adapt to new market trends and leverage new and emerging technologies, further ensuring that your cloud-based app remains competitive.
Example of How to Perform Continuous Improvement
- Gather user feedback and/or observe user behavior to identify what areas need improvement
- Prioritize adjustments and changes based on issue severity, impact on user experience, and how it aligns with your application’s goals.
- Make updates to the web application’s design and code as needed.
As mentioned earlier, user feedback plays a crucial role in achieving continuous improvement. The success of an online application is only as much as users are willing to adopt and use it—but to get an accurate idea of your users’ sentiments, pain points, and desired changes, you’ll want to know of what kinds of user feedback you can retrieve.
What are the Types of Feedback Collection Methods?
User feedback is a valuable resource that can be collected in direct and indirect forms, making continuous improvement easier by removing the guesswork and giving your developers direction to both the issues and desired features that users care about.
Examples of Direct User Feedback
Direct user feedback is found by asking the user about their opinions on your web app.
This can come in the form of a user satisfaction survey, a feedback form to fill, a simple star rating system, or usability testing.
Examples of Indirect User Feedback
Indirect user feedback provides details based on a user’s behavior.
This user data can be gathered through analytics data such as page views and bounce rates, A/B testing, heatmaps, social media mentions, and user session recordings.
Together, these two kinds of feedback paint a comprehensive picture of how your online application is doing for users, what pain points exist, and how your app’s current version is making users act. Using a variety of methods will be crucial in ensuring you don’t miss important feedback from your users.
What Kind of User Feedback Do Different Methods Produce?
Each method of gathering feedback provides different insights into how your users are experiencing your web application, but some provide more detailed and actionable insight while others provide a more general idea of user sentiment.
Questions To Ask When Considering What Feedback Methods You Really Need
- What are the main objectives of collecting user feedback? (To fix bugs? Increase conversions? Etc)
- Am I looking for feedback on a specific feature or do I need broader insights on my web app as a whole?
- Do I need qualitative feedback and open-ended insights, or do I need quantitative feedback that can be measured?
- Who are my primary users, and what aspects of my web app have the largest impact on their user experience?
What Are Common Challenges in Using User Feedback Effectively?
User feedback is an invaluable way to refine your web application, but there are common challenges to trying to collect feedback that can get in the way of making effective change.