How do you know that you built an app corresponding to users’ wants and needs? What features need improvements? What makes your users happy, pleased, or disappointed? The answer is in your users’ feedback.
Where should you ask your users for their opinions? Where they already are – in your app! Getting people to respond has a bigger likelihood in your app than on the mobile web. Mobile web surveys have a response rate of 1-3% while the rate increases to 13% with in-app surveys.
Apart from having a higher rate of response, because you are reaching out to an already existing user base, you have a chance to ask more specific questions tailored to your target audience, which eventually leads to more actionable feedback.
By identifying and improving the problems and needs, you will have a better relationship with your users, create two-way dialogue and, meet and exceed their expectations.
But, how can you improve your feedback mechanism to achieve all these?
Mobile App Feedback Collection Practices
- Have a Purpose
- Find the Best Timing
- Keep it Short
- Be Specific and Ask Different Questions
- Be Creative
- Help Users Easily Find Feedback Section
- Act on Feedback
Have a Purpose
Think about why you are actually asking for feedback. Do you want to improve the onboarding process? Do you want to offer a better experience on the login page? If you are asking a very generalistic question without a purpose, then it will be harder for you to make a difference after collecting feedback. If you aren’t going to use the feedback to improve your app, then you are just wasting your and your users’ time.
Find the Best Timing
There are few people who may like pop-ups in the middle of their experience in the app. Knowing this, when would be the best time to ask a question to your users?
According to CleverTap, the best time is after the users accomplish a task, for example after they get their shipment delivered, they finish a movie or buy a ticket. After this your users will be more willing to answer your questions and help.
Keep it Short
Shorter is better. Mobile apps are not the best platforms to create a 20 open-ended questionaire. Asking a few easy to answer questions would increase the response rate. Keep in mind that drop out rates are higher on mobile devices. Additionally, users’ attention span is around 8 seconds.
Be Specific and Ask Different Questions
Although it seems pretty obvious to be specific when it comes to collecting feedback, many product managers fail to practice it.
When you are approaching your users to ask feedback, try to use “what“ rather than “any”. Imagine these two questions: “Do you have any problems?” and “What could we do to improve your experience?”. The latter is more solution-oriented.
While you are asking a question, try to be as specific as you can to find out what exactly you can refine in your app. Although Yes/No questions are effective many times and easier to answer, they sometimes fail to collect the most needed information. In such cases, open-ended questions will provide you with more information and quality insights. However, don’t expect to get very detailed long answers since typing on mobile isn’t ideal.
Sometimes easiest questions might become the hardest if asked to wrong people. Ask questions to related users. If you are asking for feedback related to your shopping cart, make sure that you are asking the right segment of users.
Be Creative
Our eyes are used to imagine pop-up surveys asking for reviews, but this doesn’t mean that you should constrain yourself to get feedback and insight from your users. Although this post covers in-app feedback practices, it is a good idea to add that asking for feedback via e-mail, or interviewing users, and using social media is an option. The latter has become more and more popular with the rise of the poll feature on Instagram, Snapchat, etc. stories and Twitter.
Back to in-app feedback, you can incorporate some feedback mechanisms into your app. If you are currently using stories in your app, you can use the poll feature to gain insight from your users, or you can ask your users to send emojis to your story or a post on your app feed.
Although it may increase operational costs, you can also consider rich content feedback as integration of voice, images, and videos. This option is more convenient to explain complex scenarios, and add screenshots, etc.
Help Users Easily Find Feedback Section
One way to collect feedback other than using pop-ups is to spare a permanent section in your app for feedback. You can make this section visible on the menus. You can also take Support/Contact pages as where users can drop their feedback.
Act on Feedback
You collected feedback from users and it is time to act on it. The first step is letting your users know that you received it, are thankful for their feedback and the feedback will be processed in a timely manner. How will you turn the feedback into a practical plan?
Drift’s CEO David Cancel’s Spotlight Framework can guide you in the right direction.
The Framework suggests that you focus on the right questions. Imagine a user is saying “How can I import my contacts?/ I don’t know how I can import my contacts/ etc”. This user knows that they can import their contacts, they just don’t know how to do it. There is a user experience problem that needs to be improved.
If the user is saying “Can I import my contacts?/ Is there a way to import contacts?/ etc.”, then the user isn’t properly educated about your app and hence this is a product marketing problem.
If a user is stating that they aren’t sure that they are the right person to answer a question, then this is a positioning problem that needs to be improved.
You should also consider whether a feedback is coming from a free or paid user. For example, if many paid users are giving similar feedback, the improvements related to this feedback should be your priority.
The power of feedback is undeniable for every business. As a product manager, whether you are getting negative comments, low ratings, or appraisals, you should take into consideration that every feedback has the potential to fuel your app.
Check out how stories can help you with collecting feedback and improve your app!
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