Personal and authentic gets you more product feedback, more users, more growth

I always thought that presenting yourself as a person — as opposed to hiding behind a brand name — makes it more likely for people to care about what you have to say. Be it a blog post, a survey, or any customer communication. It seemed kinda obvious but I didn't know if it was actually true.

Now, I've done some research. I wanted to do this research before adding features that support this sort of personalization in our product.

The full research with links to the sources is on the blog but here's the highlights.

• Personal framing suggests accountability. Users tend to trust that their feedback will be acted upon when they know who is asking.

• Asking personally creates a subtle social bond. The request becomes a human-to-human interaction rather than user-to-machine.

• Users might empathize with a developer as a fellow human, feeling their feedback will directly affect that person's work.

• Additionally, when you frame the feedback as a meaningful contribution, it is more believable when it comes from a person than a corporation.

• The psychology at play involves social presence, reciprocity, and authenticity — users reciprocate personal effort with feedback and trust genuine appeals over robotic ones.

The upshot: making feedback requests personal and authentic tends to skyrocket participation rates and can influence the quality of feedback. In turn, that helps you grow the product much faster.

With this research done, we've just launched an ability to display your name, photo, and title in your surveys, onboarding flows, and feedback widgets.

Give it a go and let me know what you think!