How To Manage User Feedback For Your Website Or App

Part of a solid website or mobile app is its bug-free interface. While you will always battle bugs after deployment, your beta version should help smooth out any issues before you go live. To be able to improve your product, you need a feedback system. The feedback system is where your users provide you with opinions on workflow, interface, user experience, and any bugs they encounter while using the app or website. It’s a great way to improve success of your final launch. Here are some tips for managing feedback.

 

1. Use a Knowledge Base and Forum

You want to streamline feedback, so every developer, project manager, designer, and any other stakeholder can view responses. Email systems are the worst way to manage feedback. Emails aren’t guaranteed to reach an intended audience, they tend to get filtered out when too many are sent, and some client applications automatically mark a sender as spam. To avoid the hassle, create a user forum and knowledge base.

The knowledge base is somewhat similar to a FAQ page. Gather common questions or feedback messages and address them in a wiki. Users who don’t feel comfortable posting in your forum can then find answers to common problems using your knowledge base search function.

Next, set up your forum. Forums take a lot of effort to keep spammers away, moderate comments, and ensure that feedback is organized. However, it’s much more organized and reliable than email. Your staff can view forum comments and further enhance the knowledge base from common questions or concerns. It also helps app designers and engineers understand user experience issues that were overlooked.

 

2. Respond to User Feedback

Even if the feedback is negative, always respond to your end users. Encourage them to send more feedback and be as professional as possible. It’s not easy taking negative criticism, and some people don’t handle it well. Some companies hire specific forum members to reply professionally to users, so employees can avoid the temptation of responding negatively. You can also employ someone to specifically work with feedback, separate useful feedback from spiteful comments and send results to project managers.

Whatever method you employ, you should always give your users the sense that you’re listening. You should spend some time responding, so these users feel that they’re concerns are being addressed. These users often turn into die-hard fans, and they can further market your website or app.

 

3. Separate the Good from the Bad

You should have some metrics to follow before implementing changes. Users don’t always consider the big picture. They want an application to cater to their own whims and don’t think of the needs of others. As the developer, you should separate needs from desires.

A “need” is functionality required to perform a certain action. For instance, your users might need a specific button to access a web page. You might accidentally miss that button during testing and development, so now you need to add it to your functionality requirements.

In contrast, a “desire” is one where the user just wants something that doesn’t help other users as a whole. For instance, a desire could be that one user doesn’t like the color blue. He wants the application to display orange. Unless your metrics show that a majority of users are turned off by your choice in colors, you can categorize this feedback as a desire.

 

4. Don’t Take Feedback Personally

Users can get vicious with feedback. After Google made significant changes to the tabbing system in Gmail, several users and marketing people were livid. This didn’t stop Google from keeping its changes, but engineers and designers took a verbal beating after launch.

Any creative talent — especially younger designers and engineers — can take feedback personally. Don’t take it as an affront to your character. Listen to the user’s concern and put it aside for the next day if it’s overly critical. Remember, people who don’t like something are more apt to leave negative feedback than someone who is satisfied and works well with the software. The result is that designers feel like all feedback is negative.

 

Conclusion

Feedback systems are important, but companies should also have some kind of positive feedback system for the developers who work hard to create a website or app. As difficult as it is to implement, a feedback system will strengthen your website or app. These systems streamline user feedback and allow developers to focus on requirements. It also cuts down on email, phone calls, and missing out on important user features for your website or app.

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