HOW TO COLLECT USER FEEDBACK FOR YOUR MOBILE APP
User feedback will help you to get an overview of your product from a fresh perspective allowing you to adjust your product roadmap and improve your app for the better. No matter if you follow agile development or not, quick and frequent feedback is one of the important factors that can make your app more successful.
For example, if a user wanted to checkout at your e-commerce app and your app crashed, the user is likely to get annoyed or even uninstall your app entirely.
Implementing the right feedback system and defining a user journey map will help you to motivate your mobile app users at the right time.
Here are some best practices for you to maximize your app value and functionality.
BEFORE COLLECTING THE FEEDBACK
Before you start collecting feedback, it would be clever to prepare the ground.
#1. Specify the objectives
Don’t make a mistake and jump into collecting feedback with no clear goal — define the objectives first as it will help you to choose the right method and the right tool.
You should understand clearly which category your app belongs to and what kind of feedback you need to collect from users.
#2. Select the right method
When you define your feedback goal and resources, review and choose the proper method.
Review the automation user feedback tools that require little effort to set up and manage so to help your team.
#3. Experiment
Be open to experiment!
Example: if your feedback results are low, try changing the feedback approach or use different methods.
Such experiments will help you to gain more valuable feedback thus improve your app as well as overall user experience.
#4. Consider the cost
You should figure out which different feedback system to implement to determine the cost, organize your team and the delivery plan.
Adding a feedback to an app mainly involves three tasks:
- design and develop the app UI for the implementation of the user’s feedback;
- design and develop the back-end system to manage feedback data;
- process and analyze the amount of collected data and interact with users.
BEST METHODS TO COLLECT THE FEEDBACK
There are various methods to collect user feedback so make sure to review them and choose the most appropriate as per your defined app goals.
The common forms of feedback in mobile applications include the following:
Firstly, Ask for a Like
Users pick one option YES or NO from a simple question: “do you like the app”.
If the choice is YES, the user can be guided to rate the app and write comments at the Store. If the answer is NO, you should display a simple feedback form in the app, allowing users to send additional information to the back-end.
The technique can greatly increase the positive evaluation rate of an app and reduce the influence of negative comments. It enables for all feedback to be handled the same way in the back-end, which is more convenient for reviewing as well as tracking of feedback state, etc.
This can also bring extra cost within the development of a back-end management platform except when using third-party services.
Ask for Rates and Reviews
The easiest way to get the feedback is to simply ask your users within the app as both platforms (Android and iOS) support requests to users to rate and review the app. Mobile app ratings directly affect how easily your app can be found at the Stores.
The most important thing to remember is to find the perfect timing — many apps ask for reviews instantly but this usually aggravates users as they did not have time to get to know the app sufficiently to give a score.
For example, if your app has a low star rating, it may indicate that there’s an issue within the app or other parts. Selecting the appropriate people to prompt ensures to get the valuable feedback from your satisfied users but also to trigger those who do not usually engage while unhappy users can also give you the direct feedback.
In-App Net Promoter Score
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is another method to measure general sentiment but also allows users to send personalized feedback. Such process divides users into 3 groups: Promoters, Passives and Detractors based on their answers.
Measuring how many people would recommend your product will help you to learn more about general sentiment with your users. You can also use follow up questions asking users to explain their score thus get more personalized feedback you can act upon.
NPS is easily added to your mobile app — the process is smooth for users and they don’t have to leave your app to give feedback.
Support Communities
You shouldn’t do everything ‘INSIDE’ your app — you can create communities outside of your app where users can express their opinions, concerns, ask for the support or just engage with your team.
Here are few ways app companies can create communities:
- support through social media and email
- web forum on your site to help users connect and share their experiences
- multiple ways for customers to get in touch directly with your team.
Beta Tests
Developers frequently use beta tests to get insight into the user experience, especially before the official full release.
You can gather potential beta testers through your website via a simple web form asking for their email addresses.
Beta testing ensures that all the bugs designers, developers and alpha testers failed to see, to be detected and eliminated. Beta testing will enable you to understand how users will perceive your product in the future which is a very important step as it can improve the QA of the final product.
Beta testing can save you from a lot of potential PR issues if you launch a poorly made product thus a proper beta launch can cut your costs significantly.
Customer Feedback Surveys
Creating useful surveys takes more challenge than you can expect, considering there are a plethora of questions you can ask your users and you need to select only a few to collect valuable feedback.
Try to follow some simple practices:
- Ask only relevant questions
- Create friendly open-ended questions
- Create consistent rating scales
- Avoid leading questions
A good tool to understand your users’ sentiment is a mobile survey — short mobile surveys with specific questions (like feedback on a new feature) are the most efficient ones.
Always remember that the timing of surveys is critical — if your survey interrupts customer in-app experience, it may result in more harm.
Companies can collect and analyze both quantitative and qualitative feedback from users with help of such surveys.
Email and User Contact Forms
Email is the easiest way to gather user feedback as you can use each interaction to gather feedback. Try to follow some steps to maximize the chance of reply:
Set clear expectations
Users usually don’t leave feedback as they believe they will never hear back from you.
If you add a short sentence to your communication messages advising users you will soon reply to them, e.g. ‘We’ll get back to you within 24 hours’, you will build trust with your community.
Organize email feedback
Use some tools (e.g. Trello) to assign tasks for the whole team to access so that no insight is left overseen.
Automation tools will facilitate the process and keep tabs on requests while it will also give the employee a clear roadmap for the future user interactions.
Send personalized responses
Emails enable you to request more personalized feedback than in a survey.
Ask your users about the issues they struggle with or what features would they like to see or just ask why they chose your app!
Set a defined process of replying to these emails or the entire process will be futile.
The greatest benefit of email is its low cost — considering that most of the time users willing to send an email with feedback tend to be more loyal, it is more likely they will provide valuable data or interesting ideas.
On the other hand, the collected feedback would be scattered over the email messages making it more difficult for a review and data analysis.
This approach is suitable for limited budget cases, short development time, and/or development team not skilled enough for back-end development.
Usability Tests
Usability tests for mobile apps are formed to observe test users while they use your app — the goal is to measure the user friendliness of the app and support your brand better.
Such testing helps you to add value to your business and meet the requirements of your end users.
Ensuring to have good usability for your mobile app will help you to improve user satisfaction and increase revenue.
From understanding your product better, detecting loopholes and more, here are some benefits of mobile usability testing:
- Understanding the user’s in-app behavior
- Identifying bugs
- Saving on development costs
- Getting repeat customers
- Creating outstanding UX
Social Media
Social listening is another great strategy for user feedback — comments or direct mentions on social networks and also built-in polling tools like this:
Social media is invaluable when it comes to client feedback — there are different social listening tools available to collect what people say about your product or brand.
Keeping track of such mentions serves to improve your user experience and respond quickly to any reports.
You can set up alerts for your brand mentions via Google Alerts, Mention or other tools and always keep in mind that TIME plays a significant role! You should quickly address any negative comments as it can have a huge impact on your brand’s reputation.
Many brands now combine in-house employees and third-party tools to monitor all their social channels.
Message Center
A good way to provide a good user experience is to have a channel where users can turn to easily in case they need a quick response or have feedback — a message center is an excellent conversation channel for that.
Another good point is that your feedback system directs the messages to your center rather than to the app store thus eliminating friction for the user and reducing your bad reviews on the store.
Gathering the right people and guiding them to your most efficient communication channel is the right recipe for improved user experience.
Questionnaire
An effective way for feedback is a questionnaire, which lists targeted questions and multiple-choice answers for users. If you keep it simple, users will happily answer questionnaires. If the questions are too long, it is easy to trigger users’ resistance.
This approach requires to determine the feedback goals in advance, define what is more urgent at the current stage and then create questions and forms. Designing questionnaires requires to draw the most information possible out of the least amount of questions.
In terms of development, web page-like forms can provide a powerful back-end data analysis function.
Rich-content Feedback
Since textual feedback can be inconvenient to users when describing some complex scenarios, more and more apps allow feedback combining text and voice so that users can express their thoughts more easily. This greatly increases the probability of users taking the initiative to provide feedback.
In order to make the process of taking screenshots faster, in addition to the default screenshot feature of the system, a lot of apps support the “shake” gesture to trigger the screenshot. One of the biggest advantages of screenshot feedback is that there is no need to take up any screen space with dedicated controls.
The downside of voice feedback is the operation cost as it uses analysis and classification of a great number of collected recordings.
Other Tools
Some other tools you can use to review for collecting user feedback are Apptimize, mParticle and many more.
Incorporating such automation tools will help you drive more engagement, collect valuable user feedback and adjust your product roadmap.
Review all of the tools and choose the best tool that corresponds to your mobile app, your strategy and your targeted users.
WHILE COLLECTING THE FEEDBACK
Respond to user feedback in time!
Once you have successfully integrated the module into your app, you should retrieve first-hand user feedback. Whether feedback is positive or not, users will want to know whether it’s received — replying to user feedback in due time is a giant leap towards improving customer satisfaction.
- contact users advising their feedback was received and will be processed in a timely manner and express sincere appreciation.
- contact users based on their feedback content — answer their questions or clarify the future product improvement plan, etc.
- notify users when their suggestions have been accepted. This will allow them to better use the app, but also let them take some pride in improving the app.
Email is one of the means that is most unlikely to disturb the user, thus it is important here that the design of any form of feedback takes into account the provisioning of users’ email addresses for later tracking.
UPON MOBILE FEEDBACK
Once you’ve got feedback from your mobile users, you need to act upon it.
Otherwise, your users will feel like their opinions don’t matter, and that you’re not interested in creating a better experience for them. That is why you should:
Track the Right Metrics
Focus on things that are easily measurable and track the right metrics:
- The percent of purchases made through mobile devices
- The number of visits from mobile
- Time on site on mobile vs. your website
- Number of daily installs, and their sources
- Measuring the effectiveness of marketing initiatives
For example, if you’re using NPS, you’ll be able to determine how many users like your app or a feature etc., while if you do not use it, you must search the feedback for common strains like: are many people complaining about bugs or unhappy with how slow the app is and similar.
Encourage Users for Continuous Feedback
In order to encourage customers to give continuous feedback, build feedback channels into the app experience. Come up with a schedule that’s triggered by a user’s actions.
For example, when they’ve been using the app for 10 days, ask for a review. After three months of active use, ask them to update their review.
Analyze Feedback Data and Adjust the Roadmap
Ultimately, you should summarize, classify, and analyze the feedback data to identify the issues within your product as well as to prioritize them. That way, you can adjust your product roadmap accordingly.
If necessary, you can perform further user surveys and interviews with the aim to plan the next development and release plan.
CONCLUSION
Collecting customer feedback is crucial!
If you listen to your users, they can help you improve your app for the better — start from one simple method for collecting feedback before you implement more complex strategies.
Before the actual collecting, define the objective and consider functions and costs to build the feedback form; try to accurately define the feedback data entry, timing, and frequency. After this step, the feedback module can be successfully integrated into the app.
During the feedback collection phase, thank your users for their feedback and inform them about recent improvements. After collecting the feedback, you should conduct data analysis on the feedback output and effectively adjust the product roadmap.
By following these steps, a feedback mechanism can show the value and provide users with helpful details about your product.
