In-App Feedback: The Best Way to Improve the Experience of Your App

What Is In-App Feedback?

The easiest and most effective way to learn about your users’ thoughts while they use your app is through collecting in-app feedback. Collecting feedback while users are using your app provides you with real, relevant feedback at the moment when they experience anything from happiness to confusion to frustration. This immediacy is more important than ever because user expectations are constantly increasing.

According to Khoros, 83% of customers say they feel more loyal to brands that respond to and resolve their complaints. This shows that users want more than just a great user experience — they want their opinión, desires, and needs taken into account.

That’s why app development teams are now utilising in-app signals along with mobile app analytics metrics to help them interpret how users feel about their product and make product development decisions based on data rather than assumptions about user behaviour.

What is In-App Feedback and Why is it Important in Today’s App Economy

In-app feedback allows users to give feedback to the app when they are using it. This is different from an after-the-fact survey or questionnaire which relies on their recollection. In-app feedback captures a user’s thoughts right at the moment they are thinking them.

The move towards capturing contextual feedback at the time it is happening has become more important in today’s app economy as many apps are competing for speed, seamlessness, and a high degree of emotional connection. When users can provide information such as reporting confusion while going through onboarding, reporting bugs immediately after encountering them, or sending a positive experience after completing an action, the development team gets real-time insight on what is working and what isn’t.

You keep users interacting with your app in a way that feels natural by providing an immediate way for them to communicate, which reduces the amount of friction users experience while trying to communicate. This creates a seamless experience for users and allows users to communicate with you without having to leave the app and breaking the flow of communication. This creates a continuous user-driven loop of improvement for your product team, whereby they interpret the problems that users have pointed out, implement fixes, and then continue to provide users with a more natural experience as time goes by.

Because of how fragile user loyalty is in today’s world, real-time user feedback allows you to maintain an ongoing relationship with your user base regarding their needs as they occur.

In-App Feedback is the Key to Making Your App a User-Centric Experience

While analytics will tell you about users’ behaviour, in-app feedback lets you know how they actually feel. When you get feedback from your customers about how they experienced a particular feature or the reason why they found a certain flow confusing, you obtain context beyond what the numbers can show. This means that you can build a truly user-centric application that is based on how users use the app every day, rather than how you thought users would use it.

When users have the ability to provide feedback in real-time, you can identify patterns that help you understand where users are experiencing hesitation, where users find joy, and what parts of your app require additional work. These insights are useful in improving your user onboarding process by providing insight into where users experience early friction, in increasing feature adoption by providing an understanding of where users lost interest, and in improving overall usability by highlighting potential gaps in design or navigation that are not reflected in metrics.

In addition, survey methodology literature indicates that the timing and context of feedback collection strongly influence response quality: well-timed surveys have higher response rates and fewer biases compared to generic or poorly timed feedback requests. For the user, feedback is given at times when the experience is still fresh in their memory, thus it may be a more complete expression of how they feel.

The combination of emotional signals and behavioral metrics enables today’s product teams to develop a more complete understanding of user intent, providing the ability to make decisions based on what users are doing and, more importantly, why they are doing it; thereby delivering applications with an intuitive user experience that is responsive to user needs and aligned with user expectations.

Why Real-Time App Feedback Improves Decision-Making

In-app feedback helps product teams make informed decisions through immediate access to user feedback rather than through previously collected historical data or empirical assumptions. Users provide feedback as soon as an issue arises; therefore, product teams can quickly get a clear picture of problem areas in the product, usability of different features, and user satisfaction levels. Thus, product teams can also prioritize what issues need to be fixed, what features need to be enhanced, and what experiments need to be conducted based on what users have told them rather than based solely on speculation.

For instance, if a large number of users experience friction when they are trying to sign up for the app or if there is a significant number of transactions that are unable to go through due to payment processing issues, that real-time feedback indicates that the problem needs to be fixed immediately, and the scope of that problem is large. This provides product teams with a clear path to how they need to allocate their available resources to quickly develop and release an update that resolves that specific issue, thereby improving customer retention and overall customer satisfaction.

Using real-time user feedback along with the quantitative data gathered from in-app insights, product teams will see both qualitative and quantitative user inputs that allow them to begin seeing patterns associated with user behaviors, identify hidden pain points, and provide guidance for further iterations of product improvements. By acting on feedback in a timely manner, product teams move from a reactive approach to development to a proactive approach, continuously reducing friction and creating better experiences for their users.

What Types of In-App Feedback are Required to Shoot for Clarity

It is important to capture the right type of in-app feedback so that you will have actionable insights available to you. Some feedback is worth more than others and different types of feedback tell you something different about your users’ experiences.

For example, you need to give your users a way to report issues whenever they experience a crash, bug, or error, so that your team can respond quickly, ultimately reducing frustration and a negative experience. The best way to get insight into the next feature your users would like is to request a feature request directly from them so that you will be able to shape your product development priorities with their input. Micro-surveys and rating prompts are a great way to get quick quantitative feedback regarding individual user interactions/exposures to a product, providing a snapshot of user sentiment toward your product. Meanwhile, open-text responses will capture potential emotions, suggestions, and context that structured or closed-surveys fail to obtain, showing you why users are using your product and what is driving their behaviour.

Similarly, you can use Net Promoter Score (NPS) prompts in your application to measure user loyalty and willingness to provide recommendations, thus identifying a potential list of advocates and detractors for your business. If you combine all of the above-mentioned feedback types together, it will help you to build a full picture of the needs of your users, thus ensuring that improvements to your product are well-founded, specific, and true to the needs of your users.

By choosing which types of feedback and when you wish to collect them, you will have developed a system that captures both surface-level issues and the underlying motivations for user behaviours.

How to Encourage Users’ In-App Feedback Without Disturbing Their Experience

User engagement is influenced by the timing of feedback and the nature of the user’s current activity. Thus, if a user is interrupted when they are actively engaged in a specific task, they may become annoyed and stop providing feedback thus leading to a negative experience with your e-learning software. As an alternative to interrupting users at the wrong times, ask for feedback at the appropriate times, too. Examples of appropriate times would be after completing a purchase, finishing an onboarding process, or seeing a brand new feature.

According to Behavioral Psychology, users are more likely to engage when the request is less direct, when the user does not have a long list of questions to answer, and when the request is clearly relevant to their overall experience. Some examples of effective engagement methods are micro-surveys or a short list of ratings incorporated into the app (which allows users to rate based on a 0-5 scale).

Additionally, these types of surveys allow users to share their thoughts and opinions with you quickly and easily, yet without leaving your app, and without feeling overwhelmed.

The second strategy is to utilize a progressive prompting approach. By utilizing this strategy, the app will request user feedback over time, rather than requesting it from the user all at once. Maintaining user engagement prevents survey fatigue. Additionally, by personalizing feedback requests and utilizing information about the user such as their preferences, behavior and history, it improves response rates and provides meaningful feedback.

Ultimately, creating a respectful environment with multiple opportunities for users to provide feedback increases participation and supports a solidified feedback loop. Finally, by thoughtfully developing in-app feedback opportunities, they become part of a process of ongoing improvement, rather than a disruption to the user, allowing your app to evolve based on the real needs of users.

How In-App Feedback Enhances Retention and Decreases Churn

In-app feedback not only enables app developers to collect user insights, but it also provides them with tools that can help them prevent silent churn and maintain user loyalty. App developers can receive user feedback regarding issues such as bugs and confusing user interfaces as soon as they occur, allowing app developers to resolve these issues before users abandon their app or leave a negative review.

Feedback also provides app developers with early warning signs when a user begins to disengage or limit their usage of the app. For example, users who provide multiple pieces of negative feedback about a specific feature or section of the user journey may hint at a potential risk for user churn. By responding to these user feedback items, app developers can work to proactively enhance user experiences, which will help keep users engaged and satisfied.

Additionally, addressing user concerns that have been submitted through in-app feedback will show users that the voice of the user is being heard and respected. This encourages user trust and continued app engagement. In addition to reducing frustration for users, implementing an ongoing feedback loop will also help app developers better define their features, streamline workflows, improve usability, and ultimately help increase user retention rates and develop stronger user loyalty.

By incorporating user feedback into app development strategies, app developers can create a proactive system to reduce user churn while also increasing user engagement.

How to Improve the Way You Track and Interpret In-App Feedback

To effectively use the in-app feedback from users, you need to incorporate some sort of structure into the way you collect and categorize that feedback. To do this: Start by grouping each complaint or suggestion into one of the main categories: Usability Issues, Feature Requests, Performance Problems, and Emotional Responses. Once that is completed, your team will have a better understanding of the feedback they receive, because they can then use it to determine where the most frequent issues lie and which features are being requested most often. 

Combining qualitative data from user feedback with quantitative data from analytics is another way to increase your understanding of why users experience particular challenges with the application. When you combine both of these data sources and correlate them with each other, it is possible to get a clearer picture of the key areas that need improvement and the impact that these key areas are going to have on the overall experience of the user.

Lastly, Advanced Tracking Methods, such as Creating Tags for each piece of feedback received (e.g., Tagging feedback by: Feature/User Segment/Device Type), can be used to create a more detailed view of the feedback received. As these Tags are used over time, specific trends will emerge that will help highlight which improvements will have the greatest impact on User Retention and User Satisfaction.

By applying the methods above to your in-app feedback process, you will be able to report on user input with greater clarity and develop Insights from that user input that are direct results of Users’ needs and expectations.

Why Measure Your Feedback Loop and Experiment Continuously

Feedback loops are most powerful when they are measured and iterated upon regularly through experimentation. It is great to receive in-app feedback from your users, but not measuring trends or impact, or testing changes to improve, will leave a lot of this feedback unutilized. Measurement allows you to see what improvements actually improve the user experience versus what doesn’t.

Continuously experimenting with your product, using the feedback from users, will allow you to create a true evolution of the product as opposed to just a temporary solution. By A/B testing different versions of your product, validating solutions through testing and checking how users responded, you can validate that you implemented changes that ultimately alleviated user pain points effectively. Over time, this will create a cycle of data-driven improvement where each iteration is based on what your users truly need.

A well-measured feedback loop will also help identify trends between user segments, product features, and devices. This means you can utilize those trends strategically to improve retention, increase satisfaction, and build loyalty. Overall, the combination of good measurement and continuous experimentation on feedback from users becomes a powerful engine for growth and optimization of a product.

CONCLUSION

The in-app feedback feature serves as the primary resource of in-app customer support (i.e., customer service). In-app feedback provides the ability for customers to communicate with the app team about what they like, what causes them problems, and any improvements they want to see while they are using the app. Not only does this allow for better-informed product decisions, but it also creates a connection between the customer and developer, which builds trust in the relationship.

Used with care and combined with methodical analysis of the information provided by customers, it will help you identify areas of friction, improve usability, and better define features and functionality on an ongoing basis. By using this method as part of an ongoing cycle of improvement for your product, the input leaves customers with actionable insight, which serves as direction for the ongoing evolution of the application.

Developers who actively listen for and respond to in-app feedback from customers will be better prepared to engage and retain their customers through less churn and provide them with an experience that resonates. If you are about to add a new feature or are getting ready to scale your app globally, capturing real-time feedback will allow you to make thoughtful decisions based on customer input and develop your app with purpose. Interested in how you can start capturing actionable insights about your application with in-app feedback? Reach out to us to learn more about how to do so today!

FAQs

1. What is the ideal frequency for in-app feedback prompts?

The right amount of prompting gives the best user experience and engagement opportunity. If you prompt too many times, this will fatigue the user; conversely, if you prompt too infrequently, you will lose out on obtaining important insights from them. You should trigger a prompt based on the positive, meaningful interaction users have just made.

2. Why is contextual feedback more effective than generic surveys?

User feedback collected contextually reflects the sentiment of the user at the time of the experience, making it more accurate and actionable. It shows what users are doing in real-time based on their behaviour, emotional state, and the obstacles they were facing, rather than depending on the user’s recollection of that specific situation months from now.

3. How can feedback be prioritised for product improvements?

By analysing feedback for recurring issues, the severity of these issues, and their potential impact on users, it is possible to identify which changes will have the greatest effect on the overall user experience. Combining user feedback with usage statistics creates a richer view of what enhancements should be made first.

4. When should open-text feedback be used instead of rating scales?

Using a structured format works well when you have a complicated problem or an emotional experience to address. You have the opportunity to explain things such as background information, why you are giving your feedback and what you are hoping to achieve. The depth of explanation can never be communicated using numbers alone.

5. What role does in-app feedback play in retention strategies?

By using in-app feedback to identify areas of friction and unmet needs early on, proactive measures can be taken to enhance user satisfaction by decreasing churn and enhancing loyalty through these means, making it an effective tool within any retention-focused app strategy.

from Apptrove https://apptrove.com/in-app-feedback-improve-user-experience-retention/
via Apptrove