How to apply user feedback successfully

Follow these five steps to apply user feedback

Now that you have done your research, it’s time to apply user feedback. You’ll need to leverage user feedback to gain further understanding of your users. You’ll also gain insights that enable you to make meaningful improvements to the product experience.

In part one of our article, we talked about how to gather user feedback effectively.  There are multiple methods you can use to apply user feedback. Here is a five-step process framework that simplifies the process.

This is Part 2 of a two-part series on user feedback. Read Part 1 on gathering user feedback here.

Collect

First, you will need a place to centralize all your users’ feedback. Create a ‘feedback library’ where you can easily pool feedback for you and your team. The centralized location could be anything you prefer, such as a folder in Google Drive, Google spreadsheet, Airtable, or Dovetail.

At Standard Beagle, we collect all of the raw data in Google Drive and use a Google spreadsheet to collect and store all of the notes, video links and audio recordings.

Categorize

Once you have centralized all the user feedback in one place, you now need to find a way to organize the feedback. You can categorize the feedback by labeling or tagging, so they all fall under certain buckets. You wouldn’t want to have feedback asking for feature requests to be in the same place regarding bugs, right?

You should start by splitting feedback across your product, customer service, and marketing/sales categories, and then break it down further through sub categories.

Organizing your user feedback in such a manner helps you to not only sort things out, but it can also show you where to prioritize. If a specific category of feedback is more prevalent than another, then you can see at a glance where to start fixing first.

Find patterns

You may notice patterns while in the categorization step. After all, categorization is a form of finding patterns, so you may find yourself finding sub-categories during this step.

In this step, focus mainly on uncovering insights.For example, if you notice that multiple people mentioned similar feedback, that is a clear sign of an issue to address.

Finding these patterns and recurring themes can help you generate actionable insights that lead to your product toward positive improvement.

Apply

Once you have learned user insights by identifying patterns, it is time to apply learnings to your product.

There are a few crucial things to remember when remember when executing this step.

Don’t just do what your users asked for

Understand the underlying problem. Examine the insights and let that guide your decisions towards the most beneficial and desirable outcomes for your users. Experiment to figure out what changes will lead to better results for your users.

Prioritize and validate users insights, not what other teams want

During this entire process, it is important to remember that your product is used by your users. Their voices must be heard. Feedback collection should not be used as a validation tool, but rather, should be used to identify what features, bugs, and issues to be prioritized.

Learn

Last but not least, we come back to learning. Once you have applied your learnings based on your feedback, you can develop a hypothesis about user behavior in your product to investigate. This begins an entirely new process of collecting feedback.

The iterative practice of this five-step process is called the feedback loop. It is one way to make continuous improvement to your product.

Continue to collect user feedback and iterate on your product so you can create something your users truly love.

Keep that feedback loop going

User feedback should be a continuous effort. Each round of user feedback and iteration should be followed by another. Never stop collecting and applying feedback to improve your product’s functionality. And never stop learning.

And in order to learn more about your product, it is best to collect feedback with a variety of methods, as they all have individual strengths. To learn more about different methods of collecting user feedback, we recommend reading our previous article.

Remember that as long as you are focusing on listening to what your customers are saying, you’ll gain insights that lead to making your users’ product experience better. And that leads to long-lasting users.