1. Establish a customer feedback loop
Your product should have a feedback loop that feeds into your feature backlog prioritization. This will allow you to make sure customer wants and needs are proactively addressed. You can do so through customer surveys, user interviews, or user testing. Even better, record user sessions and use heatmap tools to add additional context to your analytics data. The goal is to regularly assess the top opportunities from feedback and funnel those ideas into your product development backlog, while right sizing the approach to your team and resources.
2. Invest in usability on an ongoing basis
If you feel your product’s UI and overall user experience has gotten off track, a UX audit is a great way to course correct by working with an expert to identify usability gaps throughout your product experience and help you prioritize the highest ROI quick wins and larger opportunities. The ultimate goal is to have usability as something your team champions in day-to-day product work. You can improve this by establishing or reviewing design system to provide pattern consistency, incorporating help and guidance into your UI, and iterating on user flows that cause confusion/required training to understand.
3. Keep tabs on your competition
Knowing who your competitors are is important, but you also want to have a deep understanding of their user experience. What do their users think of their product or website? What’s a best practice or something to avoid? One way we can gather this information through user testing your competitor’s sites. This is a great strategy for e-commerce companies. During the user testing, ask users to complete the same tasks across different competitor sites to compare. If you’re a B2B SaaS product company, you can use customer interviews as a way to gain insights into purchase decision making and pros and cons of competitors. Another option is to have a UX expert do a review of several competitor’s UIs through free trials or paid accounts if needed.
If you’re looking to improve how customer feedback fits into your overall product management processes, we’d be happy to discuss your product and any the best strategy for your team.
