Ways To Gather App User Feedback

Anastasia Zakrevskaya
HeadWorks
Published in
4 min readSep 18, 2017

User feedback underlies business growth — especially negative feedback. To gather in-app user feedback is a great way to be informed by people how they use your product. However, this process should be taken seriously. If done poorly, you can annoy them or even more — just drive your users away.

You’ve probably asked yourself a thousand times “Is my app sucks?” or “Does the app rock?” If you want to be sure in your app success and make your users go WOW — next information is for you.

And please don’t worry, it won’t take long because I am going to show you how you can collect your user feedback just by using four simple methods.

Contact Info

E-mail is a popular and easy way for gathering customer feedback. Everyone uses e-mail for communication to date. Moreover, people usually sign up via e-mail so you can send personal letters to make them feel free to tell you the things they wish. But keep in mind — you should reply to letters immediately; otherwise, you risk losing your partnership.

Thought-out Surveys

Create survey is a widespread method for getting user feedback. It’s really easy to set up, send and analyze them. You can do it without any difficulty. So, why not? But remember — create only direct and simple surveys. Don’t ask too many or needless questions, just make your survey as short as possible (some open-ended questions are welcome).

And, of course, rely only on surveys — it’s not enough. Consider surveys as a starting point, because if you use only this way, you won’t understand the deeper reasons behind your users’ answers.

Social Networks

Here you can instantly get feedback for your mobile app. This way called “social listening” and it is enough frank method of gathering customer feedback. You receive direct messages, comments and even mentions that can go a long way for your app business. What other benefits? You can notify your users about the latest app updates and have followers on varied social networks could be a great advantage.

Usability Testing

Well, what could be better than observe someone use your app? Thanks to usability testing you can watch exactly what features your customers use, what attracts their attention, and where they get caught up. The info you will get is invaluable. So this method will help you to detect bugs in your app, drive higher ratings and increase retention. Usability testing could be very useful in the long run.

In addition to these common methods, there is an another way how to gather customer feedback. Let’s consider some user feedback tools that can significantly improve your app.

  • Helpshift This is an in-app customer support platform that enables mobile app developers to get real user feedback. It provides such features: automated surveys, in-app notifications and push notifications, prompts users to review your app on the App Store.
  • Doorbell This is a free platform that allows you to collect user feedback on websites, iOS, and Android. It integrates with project management systems (like Trello, Sprint.ly, Pivotal Tracker) and creates tasks in them based on customer feedback; it provides analysis of feedback, automatic screenshots, sending and receiving attachments.
  • Nudgespot Offers the opportunity to interact with your users via emails, SMS and push notifications. Nudgespot has a multi-channel marketing automation core and a real-time messenger that allows you to track users activities and behavior.
  • Instabug This tool helps mobile app developers with beta testing; provides statistics, bug and crash reporting and in-app customer support. It offers extensive metadata to support debugging, inclusive of the specific steps your users have taken in the app.

To conclude

To collect user feedback is a vital process in mobile app development. It can help developers figure out why people are using one feature more often than others, what makes them uninstall it or why they stop using an app at all.

If you compare all these app reviews, you will get the whole picture of what’s really going on with your product. Then, you will use this info to find out an appropriate solution to fix bugs.

User feedback can provide you important specifics that could lead you to success. Allow users tell you where the bugs are, directly, rather than reading negative reviews on the App Store or Google Play. Try at least one method and you’ll see how you’re one step closer to the success of your app.

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