Do your users really want what you are planning to build? Try “Feedback Designs” to know.
When you design a new website, you do user research, design wireframes and mock ups, conduct usability studies, make the site live, and again gather user data. you again go and rework on features or pages that give us more bounce rates or less visits. you do not want to work on something that the user doesn’t want. you’ll do everything to make users use the stuff we’ve made.
While, the web is becoming more and more user-centered, there should be no place for assumptions. Giles Colborne says in his book Simple and usable, “First try to understand the user’s world, then make a design that fits in to their world.”
We at LiftSuggest, did a small exercise to try this out. LiftSuggest is a Product Recommendation Engine that uses Google Analytics APIs to generate product recommendations.
Once, we were ideating on a few features. This time, we decided to take users’ buy-in before building that feature. We didn’t even start design. We called this exercise “Feedback design”. Following are some features where we implemented Feedback design.
1. Feedback on Sign up – to get users’ comfort level about oAuth
While signing up with LiftSuggest earlier, the user had to provide her Google Analytics credentials to complete the sign up. It was very important for us as we use Google Analytics APIs to generate recommendations. Later we eased this process by implementing oAuth. oAuth stands for “Open Authentication” which directly authenticates users Google Analytics profile with Google servers, we don’t store her credentials. We wanted users to be convinced about this. So we tried this:
Clicking on “Why we are asking this” opens a small pop us like this:
Here, we explain why Google Analytics authentication is important. Now, if she clicks “I agree”, we know that the user is convinced. If she clicks “Not convinced”, the user gets redirected to Contact page where she can explain her concern and we can contact her back.
Result: We had 80% people who clicked “I agree” and only 20% click “Not convinced”. Apparently, we didn’t get anyone contacting us, but the crux is 80% people trusted us. It gives a great feeling.
2. Feedback before developing a module
On a page where users select the shopping cart application they are using on their website, we showed Yahoo store as coming soon and put a button, “Keep me posted about it”. It was to know how many users use yahoo store and really want it as a ready to install module, as we also had a manual sign up.
Result: We got 20 requests in a week’s time, not enough for us to start working on implementing Yahoo store. Saves us some time to try the new bar around.
3. Pricing plan
On the pricing plans page, clicking on the “?” opens description for that feature. Check the screenshot below.
We track this and use the data to know which is most popular feature that people want to know more about.
Result: We found that over 60% from total clicks were on “Design/Placement mock ups”. Later on, we made that feature available in the Free plan as well, which was not the case earlier. Why not let free members use our most popular feature?
4. Discuss
In the header of the website, you can see a tab called “Discuss”. Discuss is our user community. Earlier, there was no page for discuss. When someone clicked on it, nothing happened.
Result: But after we got over 100 clicks in just 3 days, we made the community live in just 2 more days.
So, this is how you can also use “Feedback design” in your design process and use your time to make something that your audience really wants.
