Uncommon Methods for Qualitative Data Collection: How We Bring Empathy Into Our Product Discovery And Decisions
As a product manager, you aim to be data-informed in your product decisions and you want user insights to inform your strategy and your vision. Those insights can be driven by qualitative and Quantitative data.
To give you a bit of background, Qawafel is a B2B marketplace that links suppliers to sellers of perishable food products across Saudi Arabia in the confectionery and refrigerated market.
In Qawafel, we use qualitative data and quantitive data to make better decisions and to ship top-notch products. In this article, we will go through six different channels we use in Qawafel and in particular the product team to collect some qualitative insights.
1. User Interviews —One Experience Flow & Five Retailers A Week Policy
Qualitative research isn’t about necessarily connecting with people and talking with people in open-ended dialog, although those two things are important. The heart of qualitative research is actually experience flow observation. It’s closely observing what people actually do in real scenarios to the extent that you can do that.
In Qawafel, we launch new features on a bi-weekly basis. Thus, it’s essential for us to stay connected with our users. At the beginning of each week, we pick an experience flow (e.g., Discovering suppliers, Finding products, Completing payment) and we select 5 users based on strict criteria. We ask them different questions about their experience going through the selected flow, and we collect data that leads us to optimize the current flow and the experience of future-related features.
2. In-App Feedback
One of the automated qualitative data channels we build is the app feedback feature. Through this feature, we ask the user to choose the type of their feedback, either feature request or bug report, and attach any further description or supporting images. And what we do to encourage the user to fill it more often is send automated push notifications coupled with selected rewards.
The adoption rate of the feature is skyrocketing. Users have been submitting complaints and feature requests without being interviewed or asked. Some users even use this form voluntarily to share some ideas and recommendations with us without being Incentivized.
3. App’s Rating & Order Reviews
During different stages of the user journey, we prompt the user to review our app and most importantly leave written feedback. App’s rating written feedback acts like a quick go-to channel to see what users think about our app and whether they would be potential promoters or not.
Also, we found that most users are generous info to leave feedback about our app and services in their order feedback form. Oftentimes, users leave 2–3 sentences describing their ordering experience and the effectiveness of the flow they went through.
Both of those low-cost channels are helpful when it comes to bringing the voice of the users to our brainstorming and ideation workshops. We make sure to go through all of the provided feedback before we go into any solution design workshop.
4. Support Tickets
Support tickets are your window into what users actually think. Those tickets are one of the most insightful channels a product manager would utilize to bring his product to success.
When it comes to deciding the product roadmap, most teams take purely data-driven decisions rather than listen to users. They treat the roadmap as a mere release plan for upcoming features which is a grave mistake.
In Qawafel, before we plan our roadmap, we look into support tickets and listen to the problems users are desperately trying to solve. We try to dig deeper into them to find out what’s bothering our users on both a universal and small scale. Support ticket analysis helps us come up with a 360° view of the major user’s problems and solve them through our upcoming initiatives.
5. Request Product
The top pillar of any marketplace is searching and finding. Searching can be frustrating for some users when they retrieve what they are looking for.
We implemented two methods to solve this problem, we recommend products to users, and we allow the user to submit a form requesting the product they couldn’t find and attach further details.
The data collected from the “Request Product” form is particularly helpful for our sales and acquisition team to acquire vendors who sell the most requested products. We also benefited from some of the shared feedback in this form by understanding what products are acutely being looked at by our users and ideated ways to have a better personalized marketplace.
6. Request Vendor
Some users are searching for vendors to deal with through our product. Similar to “Request Product”, we expose our users to a form called “Request Vendor” when they reach the no results stage in their supplier search journey.
The information again was helpful for the other teams. However, it was helpful for our team to understand what is the ideal vendor profile our users are looking for when it comes to supplying their shops using Qawafel.
Product managers are responsible for advocating for users internally. Qualitative research is a valuable tool to get the entire picture so you can gain a deeper understanding of who your users are, what their goals are, and how your product fits in that bigger picture. While it isn’t the only tool in a researcher’s toolbelt, it gives insights that quantitative research can’t provide.
