If you want to build great products that your end users will love, collecting feedback early and often is a key step in this process. You also want to ensure that you are not just collecting feedback from the end-users but also from stakeholders within your organization. No matter if it is Charly from Marketing or Cindy from Finance, everyone’s feedback plays a vital role in building the best version of your product or software.
An unwavering and fierce commitment to not just gathering the feedback but collecting, organizing, and sharing the feedback plays a vital role in pushing your product and business forward. Feedback collection in software projects is more than bug reporting. You want to collect experiences and feelings that the users have with your software. The people side of end-user feedback helps you to shape the customer experience of your digital product. Based on a Walker study, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.
Why Feedback Matters
Frequent feedback drives and informs your decision making, saves valuable time in the long run, and influences your product/software roadmap.
Feedback is also necessary for measuring satisfaction among your current customers. These are some of your most valuable stakeholders and the kinds of things you are hearing back from your current customers should definitely not be ignored. Use the feedback to create valuable action items to continue to improve your offerings.
Haymo Meran, head of product
Learning and managing how customers view your product, support, and the company overall continues to prove invaluable. By using early and frequent user testing you can uncover things customers may not know they’re thinking about or problems they may not know they’re struggling with. This will provide you with a clear path to make the product and experience better.
If you layer user feedback through every stage of software development, not just at the beginning or the end, you are able to move fast and deliver quality. You can capture feedback manually or with tools (for internal & external feedback). With integrations available between feedback collection tools/bug tracking/user feedback applications (like Usersnap) and project management software (like FogBugz), you can cover all your bases in the need for feedback from everyone involved.
Screenshot: Usersnap + FogBugz integrated
“How To Do It” Manually
There are many manual ways to capture feedback from users in real time that can sometimes prove to still be effective. Manual feedback collection can be valuable in connecting with the people side of your software or product, especially internally within your organization. During this Digital Age, with technology keeping us connected more than ever, reaching out through email or live chat can be quick and easy. Here are some ways you can quickly capture feedback from the people side:
- Creating a feedback survey : Using applications like Survey Monkey, you can quickly and easily create a comprehensive survey to determine things like how the user feels about your software overall? The ease of use? etc. Stakeholders easily reach this survey through a link or from within an email.
- Direct email and customer contact forms : Email is one of the most valuable ways to gather candid customer feedback. Sometimes you won’t get a specific answer to your question until you ask. Many people still want to feel valued and like their opinion matters. So you can capitalize on this by simply sending an email and asking what they think.
- Direct exploratory user interviews: It is very true that understanding your stakeholders and users is often as easy as talking to them directly. This can be accomplished through a face-to-face interview or through online video chat applications like Zoom.
- Through social media : Social media is a very powerful (and becoming more and more powerful) tool to reach your stakeholders and prospective customer base. There’s always direct comments to your probing social media post or mentions on social networks. But many social networks now have effective polling tools built in. All you have to do is simply ask a question that you want users to respond to.
The downside to manually reaching out to people to collect feedback is not on the front side, but on the backside when you receive responses. It can quickly become very difficult to differentiate the feedback and organize it so that you can learn from it and create action items. Next thing you know you’re getting isses reported, bug reports, and customer feedback from different channels all over the place. Your alerts start going crazy and you start getting pinged on Slack, email, or even in person from teammates about a button that doesn’t look like it is sized right or a request from a user for additional functionality they suggest for in the future. When feedback is reported through different channels, it quickly becomes hard for product managers to get a single backlog of all the user feedback that needs their attention—let alone organize and prioritize the most critical items for necessary immediate action.
This is why it is effective, time-saving and cost-effective to utilize powerful comprehensive tools and technology that can do this for you and allow you and your team to deliver great products faster.
“How To Do It” Effectively
Manual processes are often a lot of work. That is why we suggest a more automated way. If you utilize an automated feedback software, you can capture feedback effectively where it happens and where your users are. This software should be working inside your website or web-based application directly within the browser. After capturing this feedback you need, a software for that can manage all of the responses and move them to the appropriate development teams.
If you use a visual user feedback application in conjunction with a powerful project management software, you will quickly learn how much easier the flow of feedback into your product will become.
There is actually a powerful combination of tools available that can make your feedback collection completely streamlined. You can easily utilize the software program Usersnap for feedback capturing and FogBugz, which is seamlessly integrated, for managing thousands of feedback items.
FogBugz is a comprehensive project management software that helps you spend less time on managing and organizing and more time on creating great digital products. Through a project management system like this, you can easily align your team under a common purpose and set of goals. This allows you to plan, track, and release great software and products. FogBugz provides all you need to make great software, including project management, issue tracking, and support, fused with just enough process to help you deliver. Plus, there’s robust integration with other best of breed tools like Usersnap, Slack, GitHub, and Google Docs.
Screenshot: FogBugz
With the seamless integration of FogBugz and Usersnap, you can save valuable time and resources, and also improve accuracy in bug reporting and feedback versus manual methods. Used by over 20,000 software development teams, FogBugz is a system that makes it easy to monitor your projects. It helps your team to focus on the tasks that need to be done. You can capture features, tasks, and customer requests in a central location.
Now that you’ve got the project management side covered you have to take a look at your testing and feedback tool side. Bug tracking, website testing, and issue tracking with Usersnap have never been easier. Utilizing the built-in point and click issue reporting, you get visual feedback and additional information faster into your FogBugz project. Now, no you don’t have to ever worry about endless bug reporting for your users again.
Once you have successfully connected Usersnap with FogBugz, you will receive annotated screenshots to your FogBugz project, along with records of advanced client-side JavaScript errors as they occur, every time a bug report or feedback is created with Usersnap. This helps to bring designers, developers, and project managers together on the same page better than many other alternatives. It is very true that a screenshot often paints a thousand words and helps you deliver great products faster.
Screenshot: Usersnap feedback widget in a website
Using a bug tracking and visual feedback application like Usersnap allows your customers or stakeholders to provide a visual description of what might be a bug in form of annotated screenshots. You also get important information such as what browser was used, the used operating system, and the exact location or URL where the bug has occurred. Your testers have the option to use a drawing pen, a highlighting tool, and sticky notes to illustrate and annotate the bug report. With a screen capturing tool enabled you’ll get so much more out of the bug reports in your project management system.
“Usersnap is a great tool for real-time user experience reporting. Our development team relies on Usersnap to effectively capture bugs and user issues as they relate to the user experience. Kudos to Usersnap for easy user adoption.” Tim Smith, HLT
You can solve your project management tickets in FogBugz faster with browser screenshots from your feedback software like Usersnap.
Get detailed information on the integration of Usersnap and FogBugz.
Screenshot: Dashboard of Usersnap
Wrapping It Up
Discovering issues and bugs during the development stage of your product or software saves your precious resources, time, and money compared to if they are just detected during testing or worse during the application launch phase. You want to utilize effective visual testing and feedback through all phases of development.
Utilizing an integration of a project management software and a user testing platform can help you keep your feedback organized and prioritized so that you can address the most pressing issues and create action items to move your team forward on.
Usersnap helps Making Feedback Matter and FogBugz helps Building Software that Matters.
Perfect combination or what? ☺
Start your free 15-days trial of Usersnap seamlessly integrated with FogBugz along with your FogBugz subscription if you haven’t already. No credit card. No strings attached.
Klaus-M. Schremser
Head of Growth, Usersnap
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