2 Ways to get user feedback

There are two ways of getting feedback on your app:

• Watching how people use your app
• Talking to your customers

Each of these will give you insights that you would not get from the other.

Watching users

Watching how people use your app will give you tons of insights into how you can improve the usability of your app.

This could be creating more optimal routes through your application or finding common points of confusion. The amount of insight you can pickup from watching people use your app is quite impressive, and also kinda creepy.

You will get small insights that are likely too small to be worth submitting a feedback form for but when you fix a bunch of these small niggles you will greatly improve your product.

The free tier of Hotjar will easily be enough for most indies to get started.

Talking to customers

Talking to customers is not as easy as installing a tracking snippet, most of your customers will not be willing to spend their time sharing their thoughts with you.

But it's necessary because talking to customers will give you insights that you would not able to understand just from watching them use your app. This is more high level stuff like how well your app caters to the customer's problem that you are trying to solve. Domain specific stuff.

I've had success with making the opportunities to provide feedback frequent and very low effort.

A very accessible feedback form on your app is a must. Preferably something that isn't tucked away in a menu. Keep it visible and keep it super simple, the less clicks the better. At least while you're still finding product market fit.

I have a feedback from at the bottom of most pages in Absentia.

Another thing that has worked for me is personalised but automated emails asking for feedback. Add in a piece of information from your application to make it relevant for them. For me that's whether or not they have added any users.

Hi xxx,

I see that you haven't added any users...

At first I was sending these out manually to test how different emails performed, then I automated the best one.

I send this email 3 days after the user signs up. Plenty of time to have added some users.

Feedback from these sources will act as a starting point to your conversation with your customer. A single feedback form submission is unlikely to give you the depth of insights that you need but if you continue that conversion you might learn something about your customers.

Remember, for every customer suggestion there are likely another 10 with the same issue that couldn't be bothered to give the feedback.

Sharing a roadmap to trigger Cunningham's Law?

I'm also experimenting with sharing a brief product road map in the feedback email. My idea is that as per Cunningham's Law if the customer has a different idea of what they would benefit more from; they would be more likely to correct me than if I was to simply ask for their advice.

There is also the added benefit of my customers seeing me acting on the roadmap. It builds trust in that I am going to do what I say I'm going to do.

Here's the email I'm experimenting with:

Hi,

I'm wondering if you could give me some advice, recently I've been focusing on increasing the value that Absentia provides.

Here are the features I'm thinking of focusing on next to improve Absentia:

• Feature 1...
• Feature 2...
• Feature 3...

Do you have any thoughts on these features yourself, would they be useful to yourself? Or any other advice on how to improve our offering?

We pride ourselves on being fast to act on our customers feedback. Being a small company, we cherish any advice we can get from our customers.

Any feedback, good or bad would help greatly in focusing our efforts on what matters to our customers.

All the best,
....

I'll let you guys know that the outcomes are.