Editorial
The Gist
- Survey strengths. Customer feedback surveys offer scalable, convenient ways to gather initial user insights, but may lack depth.
- Tool diversity. Other customer feedback tools like interviews and analytics provide richer context, filling gaps in survey data.
- Design focus. User design benefits from a multi-method approach, combining different tools for a well-rounded view of user needs.
Understanding users and their needs is vital for providing exceptional products and services for great user experience design. Customer feedback surveys have long been used as the primary method to gain valuable insights and effectively cater to user needs.
Let's take a look at the strengths and weaknesses of surveys, explore various other customer research methods and customer feedback tools and highlight the advantages and limitations associated with each regarding user experience design.
Why Are We Doing Customer Research for User Experience Design?
User experience design means that an offering (whether it be a product, a service, or a combination of both) is geared toward the need of its customers and users. To accomplish that, we need to find things out about our customers and prospective customers that we don’t know yet. The more we know about them and their stated and unstated needs the more effectively we can craft solutions for them that truly help them accomplish objectives. A helpful concept is the “context of use.” It consists of several elements that in totality define the circumstances that form a user experience:
- Users — Who are the people who engage with the product?
- Goals — What outcomes do users try to achieve?
- Tasks — What activities do users undertake to reach certain goals?
- Resources — What equipment and tools do users have at their disposal when carrying out their tasks?
- Environment — Where are the users situated when carrying out their tasks? This can be the physical, social, cultural and organizational environment.
If we have sufficient information about all these elements, we should be well equipped to craft well-informed user experience designs that define and specify stellar products and services.
Related Article: 3 Ways to Reduce Bias in Customer Survey-Based Data for Effective CX
Methods to Collect Customer Feedback
There are many methods to collect customer feedback. Due to their convenience and scalability, customer feedback surveys have traditionally been — and still are — widely used. However, it is important to acknowledge the advantages and limitations of surveys and explore alternative methods to gain a more holistic understanding of the target audience of our offerings.
The Good and Bad About Customer Feedback Surveys
Customer feedback surveys offer several advantages, including the ease of creating them in feature-rich survey tools, the ability to reach many respondents, and the efficient analysis of the results (at least for answers to close-ended questions).
However, surveys have limitations, too, as it can be challenging to orchestrate follow-up or clarifying questions. Also, closed-ended survey questions, which typically constitute the majority of items in polls, only provide limited insights. Open-ended questions can accommodate that better but manually analyzing them at scale requires significant effort. However, advancements in artificial intelligence have facilitated the interpretation of free text answers greatly.
Finally, customer feedback surveys primarily capture attitudinal information, offering insights into users' opinions and preferences which may not coincide with their actual behavior. Just because a respondent says that she most likely will use a certain product feature does not mean she actually will. One of the elements of the context of use was the physical, social, cultural and organizational environment in which an offering is going to be used. It is very hard to sufficiently gather all the required information for that in a survey.
Related Article: Making Customer Surveys Count in the B2B, Industrial Worlds
What Are Other Customer Feedback Tools We Can Utilize?
Interviews
Interviews, whether structured or semi-structured, provide a qualitative approach to understanding users. While interviews allow for in-depth exploration of topics, they involve fewer participants than surveys and thus may not provide representative data. Executing and analyzing interviews can be more time-consuming, but here again AI can help.
Like surveys, interviews that are being conducted outside the actual context of use environment offer valuable attitudinal insights but limited understanding about real behavior, because accurately and reliably remembering details about the physical, social, cultural, and organizational environment is typically hard for interviewees. I cover interviews done in the real environment below under “Contextual Inquiry.”
Related Article: UX Research vs. UX Design: Exploring Key Differences
Focus Groups
Focus groups leverage the dynamics of a group interview where several participants are present and interact. This facilitates discussions about preferences and attitudes and fosters consensus building among the participants. This makes focus groups effective and efficient; however, they also have limitations, such as the potential for dominant voices to overshadow others, and the risk of individual participants acquiescing to the group's majority opinions without proper reflection (aka “group think”).
Being a special kind of interview method, focus groups primarily capture attitudinal data. The same limitation about finding things out about the context of use that I discussed for interviews applies here as well.
Related Article: Why Behavioral Data Is the New Focus Group
Contextual Inquiry
Like the name says, this method to collect customer feedback is used in context, i.e. in the users’ environment. It is a field visit to the actual location where a user resides. There, observing how a user carries out his regular workflows is combined with the asking of questions around those activities. Through immersion into the context of use, you can gather insights that go beyond the surface as you see things firsthand and have the opportunity to inquire about anything that needs explanation or clarification. Two downsides of the richness of insights this method elicits, are:
- Analyzing and synthesizing the high volume of data, much of which unstructured, is significant — but very much worth it.
- The fact that carrying out and analyzing the results from contextual inquiries is time-consuming and limits the number of inquires that can be conducted. As a consequence, the findings — while rich — may not be representative of the total target audience of your offering.
Usability Testing
Usability testing provides an experiential approach to understanding users by observing their interactions with a product or service. In order to identify usability issues, a relatively small number of participants is studied — typically between 5 and 10. While other factors constituting the context of use may be addressed, the focus in usability testing is on the interaction with the object being tested. Usability testing not only assesses verbal and non-verbal reactions toward the test object, it also enables the assessment of metrics related to task completion, efficiency and user satisfaction.
Usability testing yields behavioral information, but even though realistic test tasks are being used, two factors limit the representativeness of the context of use:
- The test object oftentimes is only a limited prototype, missing many features and qualities that a market-ready offering would have.
- The physical test setting is often outside the natural environment of the users.
Analytics
By tracking how users interact with a software or website on a mouse-click level, you can understand what they do, what their preferences are, which areas in the product work well and which don’t work so well. This method is 100% behavioral, which is good because it tells you in detail WHAT users really do.
What it does not inform you about is WHY users do what they do. To answer this question, you have to correlate analytics data with results from interviews, surveys, or contextual inquiries. An effective example is utilizing an intercept poll that shows up on the UI of a website right after a certain task flow has been completed, inquiring about user feedback.
Conclusion on Customer Feedback Surveys
In order to accomplish great user experience design, we need to know enough about our target audience. How much is “enough” varies by the nature of your offering, but the richer and more authentic your knowledge about the context of use, the better. While the effort and cost of carrying out user research always has to be considered, a mix of methods may yield the best results.
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Combining analytics and intercept surveys is one example. Another is to first run customer feedback surveys with many respondents, and then, after synthesizing results, do follow-up interviews in order to deepen the insights gained. Conversely, interviews can be done first in order to identify signals and patterns which then can be validated through surveys and analytics in higher numbers.
You have the toolbox filled with customer feedback tools, now you just need to pick out the ones that work best for your particular needs!
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