How to Channel User Feedback Into Engineering Action
As a developer trying to improve a software product, user feedback can be the missing key to discovering the best new features. At the end of the day, we’re trying to build useful tools for our users. It can sometimes be easy to lose sight of how a consumer might actually be using our products. Ironically, it becomes harder to see the big picture the more intimately familiar we are with our software. We know that our users have valuable insight when it comes to improvements, but how do you take the nebulous concept of user feedback and turn it into real-world wins for your product?
Obtaining User Feedback
The first step is to open the floodgates and actually make your team receptive to user feedback. But what does that look like? Here at BigCommerce, we have many channels through which our users can share their needs and wants.
It’s important to give your users easy access to outlets for their suggestions! Your users are out there and they likely have strong opinions about what your team is getting right, and which features and services need improvement.
The BigCommerce Community is the primary place where merchants can share feedback with our product and engineering teams. BigCommerce features a program where users can suggest and vote on feature Ideas that are then funneled to our P&E teams. The voting system lets our engineers quickly aggregate interest and importance.
Product managers also collaborate with merchants and beta test new features. Users will share their feedback about new features making it easier for us to understand the impact new functionality will have on merchants’ stores.
It can sometimes be surprising to find out what your users value the most, especially when you’ve done your own research that suggests otherwise. But again, the two-way feedback process highlights why listening to your users is so important.
Cutting Through The Noise
Making yourself available for feedback can feel a bit like drinking from a firehose. What are you going to do with all of this information? Every suggestion from users can feel meaningful when you’re trying to make your software better. There are a few important things to consider next: First, determine which feedback is actionable and what isn’t. How do you do this?
Stevie Huval, Product Manager at BigCommerce, explains a key consideration is making sure user suggestions are aligned with your overall goals as a company.
“We have a strategic vision, and the first stopping point is finding out if [the feedback] fits into that,” she said. It’s great to hear from your users about what they need, but what if demand for certain functionality is simply coming from a loud majority?
“We also have to think about whether there’s a market for that new feature, and the overall strategy it helps us achieve,” Stevie says.
The next step is boiling down a suggestion to its core and figuring out what users’ needs are.
“A lot of times [users] will think of things in terms of features like ‘I want a checkbox that does X,’ but we have to eliminate from our minds the feature users are envisioning, and try to understand the problem they’re having and then try to solve it in a way that makes sense to the BigCommerce platform.”
Lastly, trust that the decisions you’re making as the product owner are the right ones. Ultimately, you are one who is most familiar with your product, and you’ll have to decide whether user feedback is important enough to be actionable.
“You don’t want to feel like you’re disappointing your users,” Stevie says. “Saying yes or no to every request is going to feel like a tough decision.”
Turning Feedback Into Features
Your users have let you know what’s important to them, and now you’ve chosen which key features to include on your product roadmap based on their input. Great! Betsy Dupuis, User Experience Designer at BigCommerce, says the next step is to gather more information about how your users are interacting with the software.
“Sometimes users will ask for a feature that helps them achieve a complex task, for example,” Dupuis said. “But the answer could be to completely automate that action, or remove it as part of a workflow.” You might be surprised to learn that removing a feature can be just as valuable to users if it gets in their way.
The BigCommerce team also uses tools like FullStory, which captures users interacting with the Control Panel during moderated testing to better understand how to fit new features into a merchant’s existing workflow.
Another important facet of fitting new features in with existing functionality is being deeply familiar with what the software is capable of under the hood. If you’re not an engineer yourself, it’s important to talk with your team about what is possible within the current framework. You might be able to easily implement a feature request with very little in the way of time or dev work.
“If you can change a UI element in a way that reduces friction for a user, it’s a lot less expensive than, for example, needing to extend a database,” Dupuis said.
Closing the Loop
You’ve taken feedback from your audience and delivered an amazing new feature! This is what makes the whole process worth it. However, you’re not done until you close the communication loop between you and your users. Otherwise, how will your audience know that you listened to their awesome suggestions to make your product even better?
On the BigCommerce Developer Documentation team, we publish a Changelog to let users know about important updates and feature releases.
The Product Blog is also a place where you can find in-depth news on BigCommerce platform-wide changes and new functionality.
Final thought: Don’t forget to thank your most vocal users for their feedback! These folks can become valuable allies and advocates in the future.
