Speaking and listening to your customers. Taking the time to understand how your product fits into their daily lives and how they use it. There are lots of different ways to conduct user research and at Si digital we typically base ours within a Design Thinking framework. Customer feedback forms part of the empathise phase.

The best place to start when trying to understand how your customers are using your app is by conducting a survey. There are numerous ways to put a survey together with different methods to deliver these to your customers.

Capturing feedback within the context of your app whilst your customer uses it is invaluable. This might be through adding a feedback form in the menu or alternatively integrating with a third-party tool such as Instabug to trigger feedback forms during certain key events.

Receiving feedback from customers whilst they’re using your app can help capture those in the moment thoughts or issues.

For bigger picture feedback, email surveys to your customer base can help you build a deeper understanding of what they want to see in future iterations. It’s important to keep these questions short and focused. If you want to send a deeper dive survey, it’s worth considering how you might incentivise customers to give up their time to help. Consider using services such as Typeform or Survey Monkey.

If your product has been on the app store for a while, it’s likely that you will have begun asking for reviews to help promote the app with Apple or equivalent. Although negative reviews are never nice to receive, they can be an essential part of learning more about customer frustrations. Read all app store reviews that are both positive and negative, reply and ask for more information. Begin to identify patterns between reviews. Are some customers frustrated by the same things? This will give a good indication of areas to focus iterations.

To gain a real insight into how your customers use your product, user testing is really a must. Surveys can act as a useful quantitative tool whereas user testing can help you get that qualitative feedback.

Testing with customers really is more accessible than ever. Complicated lab setups are no longer required and a simple round of tests can be achieved quite rapidly using a tool like Zoom.

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we are all adaptable and remote setups are now commonplace.

When we user test at Si digital, we tend to follow the principle of testing with a set of 5 users, where up to 80% of issues can be identified. After this, you will see diminishing results.

In terms of the actual tests, we establish the goals of our customers’ products and write tasks around the key user journeys that happen. This is then observed during user testing sessions to see how customers get on. Using a moderated, think aloud approach, it’s amazing what can be uncovered.

Good question. After you’ve spent the time surveying customers, combing through reviews and gaining real insight from user testing, it’s good to begin drawing patterns between all the various feedback types. It’s likely that the bigger changes and ideas will become part of a longer term product roadmap and move into the Design Thinking framework, but with smaller, quicker changes, it’s good to break this out into three stages.