A lot of our interaction with end-users goes through project administrators on the client’s side. That makes it hard to collect good feedback. A while ago I wrote about making the product interact with users. Truth is, we got very little useful feedback. People in the middle of a process apparently rarely take time out to give feedback. At least not in a B2B scenario.
We received very useful and valuable feedback the two times we made changes that took something away from users, that they had come to value. Each time we received immediate, articulate, not always friendly but very helpful feedback. Each time we learned something about how people actually use the product and as a consequence were able to make it even better.
We’ll have to think about that some more…….
Hi Chris,
You are not alone. We’ve been experiencing the same problems in B2C scenario. The good news: People in general are eager to share experiences and make suggestions. The bad news: Everybody is busy these days and unfortunately this will not be changed during the next 100 years. Therefore we have two directions to go from here:
1. simplify the feedback procedure as much as possible and than make it a bit more simple
2. provide our customers with motivation to spend these 2-5 minutes on providing a feedback
As for the first direction, the entry level for providing a feedback must be really low. I sow a screenshot in your February post where you provide customers with email where they could send a feedback. IMHO this is not enough. In the best way there should be a few questions with the choice of answers and possibility to type own variant. I bet that you would increase answers ratio by requiring a few clicks instead of writing an answer.
Another suggestion from my experience: never ever use a questionnaire document which is longer than 1 page, never ever
. Users will never participate in a feedback process after this painful experience of seeing 3 pages of questions 
The feedback process will be even more effective if you add a bit of motivation to feedback process. For instance a bottle of wine/schnapps/vodka (depending on the region) to those participants whos suggestions will be implemented. Well, you have a marketing team who have more bright ideas than mine. They can even take into account the target group preferences (Martini for girls from accounting? Hennessey for construction PMs?)
Another solution (which you most probably use in certain extend) is automatic statistics gathering about certain processes usage and time spend on certain pages. You will see what are working-horse processes which should be optimized and tested especially carefully before new releases and which functions needs to be advertised more among users.
Alex,
I guess you are absolutely right that the hurdles to giving feedback should be as low as possible. Unfortunately we have not yet been able to come up with any multiple choice questions to find out what people REALLY want. Some interaction is always needed. My feeling is, that sort of interaction is easier to get going if people are passionate about your product – ideally in the positive, but we found that even negative passion creates meaningful conversations.
We practically live in the usage statistics that we get from our product and I would never again want to work on a product without that sort of data, but they have to be used with care. One of the times we took functionality away based on our usage analysis. We found that only 4% of our users used a certain feature more than once a week and de-released it. Our colleagues from support tried to warn us, but couldn’t find the right words to explain the value of this feature to us.
The feedback we got just from a fraction of those 4% was extremely valuable, we learned a lot about what our users REALLY want to do with our product. The feature came back in slightly different form and today is one of THE differentiating features we offer.
1. You can go away, as well, with one sheet questionnaire, two pages – sides.
But this can not replace watching your application being used.
2. Getting involved with alcohol, as a prize, is fundamentally wrong.
3. I wonder why conject was on top of “telecommuting jobs programmer” google query, but it was pleasure to see attitude and people of the company.