4 steps to receiving more valuable user feedback on your digital product

Who defines the success of your digital product? You? Or the market?

And in your market, the definitions of success for your digital product rely on one opinion.

The user.

Therefore, listening to user feedback becomes essential to improving your digital product, if not the prosperity of your entire business.

In this article, we discuss the importance of user feedback and how you can best collect data to ensure you have all the information you need to design, develop, or modify your digital product.

Why is user feedback important?

User feedback goes deeper than simply seeking praise for your digital product. Sure. It’s always nice to hear positive and complimentary reviews to gratify our hard work. But user feedback becomes much more valuable when we listen to the criticism.

After all, receiving and listening to constructive criticism sometimes provides the next step to improvement. We require the guidance of fresh eyes to renew our perspective and fuel our innovation.

Because while it’s easy to gravitate towards opinions aligned with our beliefs, we don’t learn within echo chambers, and sometimes people will just agree to be polite.

Whether you’re in the middle of digitally transforming your company or launching a digital product, it’s easy to encounter usability issues without even knowing.

Let’s put this into context. According to UserZoom, 73% of businesses can’t provide a consistent UX across their different digital channels. While Founder Jar claims 32% of users will abandon a brand after one bad experience.

Whether we like our overall digital product review or not, when determining the all-important user experience (UX) and performance, we must actively pursue legitimate critical perspectives and leverage them to redefine our ideas.

Taking on these user insights can be the difference in making your product more than market-ready. As a foundation, it allows you to enhance further and even exceed consumer expectations.

However, refusing to collect user feedback will give you less chance of meeting requirements, let alone exceeding expectations. And before you question the validity of user research, Forbes revealed that every dollar invested in UX brings $100 in return. That’s a whopping ROI of 9,900%!

How to collect user feedback?

Now we understand the importance, how do we gather user feedback to enrich our digital product decision-making?

Here are a few tips to help you collect valuable user feedback that can improve your overall digital product review:

1. User feedback questions (For context)

Context is everything when determining valuable feedback from irrelevant noise.

Therefore, it pays to ask questions that provide your digital product development with contextual feedback. For example, asking simple questions can provide you with insightful data before making further sweeping conclusions about the success of your digital product.

Questions like:

• “How will you use our service?” (Personal or business)
• “Where did you hear about us?”
• "Did we meet, exceed or fail your expectations?”

Providing yourself with context should be the first valuable aspect to fuel your digital product review and can be achieved with a few easy questions.

Setting clear goals for the feedback you need to gather with contextually driven feedback questions will help you avoid a maze of irrelevant insights.

2. User feedback testing (For UX)

With our all-essential contextual feedback understood, next, we move on to the testing aspect of our user feedback. Testing the experience of your digital product is essential in providing you with the crucial overall usability of your digital product. We can break down user feedback testing into two forms:

Moderated and unmoderated user testing.

Moderated user testing gives you a real-time test of your digital product by a qualified moderator. On the other hand, unmoderated user testing consists of testers completing predetermined tasks without the guidance of a moderator.

Although moderated user testing is more expensive, it provides a more extensive review of your digital product. Unmoderated user testing is ideal for collecting user feedback quickly but without the accuracy and level of insight a moderated user test can provide.

User testing is a vital application for the overall user experience feedback. From within the hands of your consumer, the UX of your product plays an integral role in how well it performs on the market.

3. User feedback tools (For metrics)

Receiving relevant user feedback for your overall digital product review requires the right tools to complete the job. Depending on your digital product, user feedback tools can vary across platforms and methods.

For example, if your product is an app, you can include app user feedback buttons and features such as surveys and prompt ratings. You can then support your specific feedback tools, like AI chatbots, with broader feedback tools, such as direct communication on social media. 

Aligning the correct tools with relevant information will provide you with the metrics to evaluate the success of your digital product.

4. User feedback survey

Context, tools, and testing ticked; it comes down to understanding our user preferences in more detail.

Cue the classic user feedback survey.

As the next natural step after user testing, survey questions will provide you with the UX insights required to improve your digital product. These survey questions should focus on your UX and finding criticisms compared to the context gathered initially in the user feedback questions.

User feedback final steps

With all the user feedback data to hand, finally, it comes down to utilising these insights. This process requires evaluating the data and looking for patterns. A thorough technical integration will help sort your data into relevant categories.

Optimising the overall usability of your digital product from your user feedback helps with the support of a digital product service blueprint. Every aspect of the data received from the user feedback and testing can establish the actions of your user when interacting with your digital product.

Enhance your digital product review with user feedback experts

Hopefully, this article has given you a few extra insights to collect better data. However, we’re only scratching the surface. At Stoked, we can help you delve deeper and make more informed decisions.

We recognise user feedback's importance and always include it as a vital stage in our digital product development and digital transformation projects.

Essentially, without relevant user feedback, you will not understand the essential usability of your product. And remember to seek constructive criticism and actively pursue critical perspectives. Only this approach will help leverage and refine your ideas. Innovation thrives when you embrace diverse viewpoints!

For more information on how we can enhance your digital product review with high-quality user feedback, get in touch today.