While you must create products that meet your business goals, you must also ensure that your products address users’ needs. Ascertaining whether a product works for users requires gathering their feedback. Listening to users’ viewpoints helps you better understand their experiences, ultimately providing you an opportunity to take corrective actions to meet their expectations.
Research by Syncly indicates that 40% of the 300 software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies they studied were collecting user feedback. These businesses have implemented user-feedback systems to shape their product experiences.
User feedback can help teams create meaningful, easy-to-use designs for Web apps, mobile apps, Web sites, and SaaS products. However, before endeavoring to make gathering user feedback a core part of your product-development process, you should learn about the three major types of user feedback and methods and tools for collecting that data.
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Types of User Feedback and Methods and Tools for Feedback Collection
User feedback is important in UX design because it can help you create better products that build greater loyalty among your existing users. There are three types of user feedback that I’ll explore in detail: direct, indirect, and inferred feedback. Each type of feedback reveals different insights into how users feel about your product, how they behave in regard to your product, and whether they need your product.
By identifying what type of feedback optimally suits a particular stage of product development, teams can better support their making more meaningful design decisions. There are many methods and tools for gathering user feedback. Some involve asking users direct questions, while others draw insights from users’ behaviors. The available tools range from classic surveys to specialized platforms for recording test sessions. Deciding what methods and tools would be right for a project depends on the product, the team’s goals, and how quickly you need feedback.
1. Direct Feedback
Direct feedback is the information that users immediately share with you, often without any need for complex interpretation. It includes opinions or ratings that users give a product during or immediately after a product experience. An example is a pop-up message that asks users to rate a feature right after using it, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1—A feature that lets users provide direct feedback
Using specialized software, you can add pop-ups, in-app surveys, or feedback widgets that appear at the right moment in users’ workflow to gather their genuine impressions, without becoming a nuisance.
However, be mindful of potential biases. Users might provide feedback that is based on their emotional state at the moment, which might not fully represent their overall experience.
Collection Methods
Gathering direct feedback requires planning opportunities for users to provide the information you need about their experiences. Tools that provide direct-collection methods integrate pop-ups, in-app surveys, or feedback widgets into a Web site or product to capture users’ input at strategic points in their journey. Provide the right user interface to give users an opportunity to give you feedback by asking them questions, conducting a short interview, or moderating their usage session.
Surveys and Questionnaires
Surveys and questionnaires provide structured input, including the following:
customer satisfaction (CSAT)—CSAT measuring software lets you gather information about customer satisfaction.
net promoter score (NPS)—Gathering NPS data requires leveraging NPS tools.
customer effort score (CES)—Measure distinct aspects of user sentiment.
There are also platforms such as Typeform and Google Forms for gathering quick responses from users. These require well-designed questions and provide data that is easy to collect and analyze.
Interviews
User interviews offer deeper insights because they let teams hear users’ tone of voice and see their expressions. Predetermine your need for user interviews based on product areas that require more detailed input.
Try to ask focused questions that can help you identify the underlying issues and implement precise solutions. For example, a QA expert might lead product-security or system-reliability discussions during user interviews. Following these sessions, the expert could assign action items such as running a comprehensive security check, using code security tools to conduct in-depth code scanning, or collaborating with the UX design team to address any concerns relating to the user interface (UI).
You can choose from among a variety of user-interview tools to identify questions about features. Thus, your team can discover flaws early and respond more effectively.
Usability Testing
You can conduct usability testing in person or remotely. You can run moderated test sessions to receive live guidance, while guerrilla testing can occur in casual settings such as coffee shops where you can ask for feedback on your product.
To maintain your professional connections with test participants, be sure to share your digital business card, which helps you establish credibility and makes it easier for them to reach out to provide additional feedback or ask questions after a usability study is complete.
Online platforms such as Loop11, Trymata, and Userlytics can simplify participant recruitment and reporting. You can add another layer of testing by conducting A/B testing to compare the performance of two versions of a page or feature.
2. Indirect Feedback
Indirect feedback comprises opinions that users share outside formal channels such as on social media, in blog comments, or through third-party review sites. When your goal is to enhance the user experience by leveraging customer feedback, collecting feedback through different channels is essential. People often feel more comfortable speaking candidly in such spaces, producing honest critiques and fresh suggestions. An example might be a user review on a business’s Facebook page, as shown in Figure 2, or tweeting about a glitch the user has encountered.
Monitoring such comments and reviews takes effort, but can reveal issues or patterns that might not appear in formal surveys.
Collection Methods and Tools
Let’s look at some collection methods and tools for gathering indirect feedback, including online and social-media reviews and customer-support interactions. Gathering indirect feedback requires checking online platforms, review sites, and support channels. Many users share their opinions spontaneously, so teams must be ready to listen, then organize users’ thoughts. Tools that track brand mentions or compile reviews can help you quickly surface common themes.
Online Reviews
Online reviews appear on sites such as G2 or Trustpilot, which capture users’ opinions, sometimes using star ratings and comments, as shown in Figure 3. Adding small widgets on product pages can highlight such reviews. Plus some platforms offer alerts whenever someone posts a new mention.
Some people share their praise and complaints on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook. By tracking hashtags or brand mentions, teams can see what users are saying. Software such as Buffer, Keyhole, or Zoho Social simplifies the monitoring of social-media reviews and can help you spot trends. You can quickly identify and address UX design problems or build upon positive comments to further enhance the user experience.
Customer-Support Interactions
Support tickets, live chats, and phone calls provide excellent opportunities for gathering indirect feedback. As part of their operational strategy, many organizations are utilizing fractional Chief Operating Officer (COO) services to analyze these feedback channels. To analyze interactions for patterns, adopt tools such as SentiSum, CustomerGauge, or Sprinklr.
You’ll need to provide employee training for your support staff so they can learn the best ways to record essential details. By training other teams as well, you can integrate everyone’s efforts, make sure they’re working toward a common goal, and deliver a top-notch customer experience.
3. Inferred Feedback
You can draw inferred feedback from users’ actions rather than their direct statements or reviews. This requires observing how people move through a user interface, what links they click or QR codes they scan, and where they hesitate. These patterns of behavior can highlight usability challenges that users might never mention in a survey or in comments. One example is tracking how participants navigate a prototype and identifying where they get stuck, as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4—Tracking users’ paths
Taking this approach, you can discover hidden painpoints that typical questionnaires might miss. Teams often rely on analytics to see what features are popular as well as which features users ignore. By interpreting users’ actual behaviors, UX designers and developers can gain insights that lead to more user-friendly solutions.
Collection Methods and Tools
Collecting inferred feedback involves tracking users’ clicks, scrolls, and other interactions. Various tools let you create visual maps of user behaviors or record user sessions for later review. To confirm your assumptions, you must combine your observations with direct and indirect feedback. Let’s explore some popular ways of gathering inferred data.
Heatmaps
Heatmaps display clicks, scroll depth, and mouse movements on a page, showing which parts of a page layout draw users’ attention and which they ignore. Services such as hotjar, which is shown in Figure 5, and Crazy Egg offer heatmap features. By interpreting these visuals, teams can adjust page layouts or highlight overlooked functions.
Session recordings capture entire user journeys, giving teams a playback option that lets them see exactly how users navigate. Tools such as LuckyOrange and LogRocket record clicks, scrolls, and mouse hovers. Watching a few session recordings can reveal confusion points or friction. This method is especially beneficial during early prototyping.
Usage Histories and Patterns
Behavior-analytics platforms such as Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, and Heap monitor users’ actions over time. Product teams can identify which features people use frequently, which they abandon, and how user engagement changes across releases. Analyzing such metrics helps teams predict users’ needs and make design adjustments that improve workflows.
Conclusion
In summary, direct, indirect, and inferred feedback offer unique perspectives on how users experience a product. You can combine these different types of feedback to give product teams a fuller picture of users’ needs.
Conduct quick polls, monitor social media, and implement usage analytics to create a feedback loop that highlights UX design flaws and sparks new design ideas. Once your team applies users’ feedback, users will feel rewarded for sharing their thoughts. By consistently gathering and acting on users’ feedback, teams can create products that resonate deeply with their audience. Top-notch UX design requires listening, analyzing, and adapting UX designs based on user feedback.
As the founder of Ranking Bell, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketing and organic-growth agency, Mehdi helps SaaS businesses drive organic growth and customer acquisition through search-engine optimization (SEO) and data-driven, content-marketing strategies. Mehdi spends his spare time musing about startup growth strategies, personal productivity, and remote work. Read More
