Kick-start your continuous user research in 5 steps
Determine and compare your key sources of feedback from the user to simplify the research process and maximize the influence!
A lot of time has passed since I wrote the article for the last time, and I must admit that I missed, sharing that I study daily, with a design community.
To do this, I want to conduct you through how my team and I created a continuous process of research in OpenClassrooms, and how it helped us to ensure the best information to accumulate roadmaps and ultimately improve the experience of our users.
By the end of this article, you can do the same for your product!
Let’s plunge!
You are right to ask this question! 🙂
One of my main beliefs is that user research should have a strong influence on the company, remaining effective and effective. Unfortunately, this is not always the case: in some companies, user research can slow down decision -making or lead to a poor strategic choice.
The main goals of continuous research are:
- Regularly and easy to collect user reviews about the strategic parts of the product
- Consolidation of knowledge about users
- Inclusion of the user decision -making process
Feedback from users continuously helps to set priorities in the roadmap, improve user experience and accelerate iteration cycles.
Have you ever noticed that user research is very similar to data analysis? As in the case of data, the structuring and cleaning of your sources before extracting a valuable and effective understanding is crucial.
To start the process of continuous research, these are the questions that you need to ask yourself:
- Who already has regular contacts with users in the company? (for example, sales, customer success)
- They already collect regular reviews and how? (for example, polls, csat, calls)
- How do these sources work? (for example, the number of monthly answers)
- This feedback is regularly analyzed and by whom?
- What is the purpose of these feedback sources?
- What understanding do they generate?
From these sources, determine those that relate to continuous research, eliminate duplicates and delete those that do not provide real value. Sources suggest that will give relevant information in the long term.
Clean excess or low feedback sources in which there is no clear property or goal.
Now that you have determined the most relevant feedback sources, you can start mapping them at each stage of the user path to have a good general idea of what is available. You may also need to create new feedback sources as a strategic point of contact for business goals that have not yet been covered. In any case, I really recommend starting with a small one and complete the mapping one step at a time.
In OpenClassrooms, we classified various types of sources that fed continuous research:
Step experience polls – feedback from the user step
These are the main sources of feedback for continuous studies of detachments. We have one survey at the end of each step consisting of three main parts:
- 1. Csat – client satisfaction
He measures satisfaction in certain parts of user experience.
Question: “How happy you are [Step Name] process?“ - 2. Ces – client efforts
He measures the efforts necessary for specific actions.
Question: “Having completed it [Action or Step] It seemed: very easy“ - 3. High -quality feedback
This open question provides the context for ratings, helping us understand “why” for user ratings and collect improvement ideas.
In the end, we add the question to collect emails from users interested in improving the product, creating a user pool for testing and interviews!
Recently, we checked the adding a question about the clarity of the step to evaluate whether the available information is clear and useful. This will help us more accurately measure the effect of content.
NPP – reviews about global experience
The clear indicator of the promoter (NPS) measures the loyalty of customers to the brand. High -quality feedback informs the company about the main problems and expectations of users regarding their global experience in working with a product or service.
Question: “You would recommend [Name of the company]?“
NPS is widely discussed because it provides wide feedback, which is not always directly effective. Nevertheless, the categorization of answers in the topics allows us to change the monitor of user satisfaction and dissatisfaction over time and better understand why.
Temporary sources- feedback before or after release
These are temporary sources released for a specific purpose and having a whole life from 1 to 6 months. They include surveys, user tests and interviews that help collect reviews on a specific topic.
External sources
These are third -party sources, such as App Store reviews, Google or Trustpilot ratings. Although you do not control them, their analysis helps to test understanding and point trends that align – or not – with your own ideas.
Get more information about continuous research in this article.
Now that you started to apply your sources on the map, you can take another step, documenting each of them more accurately:
- Target: What do we want to measure? How does this fit into our strategy and informs solutions?
- Source: Where is it stored? In what tool?
- Format: How is feedback going? (For example, in products, e -mail, call)
- Trigger: At what stage is the reviews requested? Is there a specific trigger?
- Filter: Targets for specific user segments?
- Number: How many answers were received monthly? Does the source work well?
This allows everyone in the team to understand what sources exist and why they are used.
Clarification of this information helps the teams understand existing sources and their goals, providing, if necessary, easy access to unprocessed data. It also prevents excessive surveys that ask such questions – and your users will be grateful for this! 🙂
I strongly recommend that you do this in cooperation with other teams (for example, marketing, support, sales, …). This display should also belong to them, and they should be able to help you update and improve it.
Now you have feedback sources that are relevant, applied to the card and documented: well done!
But inanalized feedback has no value, does it agree? Now you need to guarantee that this material is regularly analyzed without overwhelming commands. In OpenClassrooms, we consider reviews monthly, as a rule, at the end of each month.
All reviews are automatically stored in a special folder in our research storage:
We can import several sources into the same folder, allowing us to cross the interview of users, examining experience in steps and external sources. This increases the reliability of understanding due to the merger of various prospects.
Product designers analyze feedback within their area, appropriately marking and classifying it:
This guarantees that designers and product managers receive a deeper understanding of user problems, while maintaining the process effective.
But this process of maintaining content can be time -consuming. To optimize it further, we are experimenting with AI to help in the analysis and automatic classification of feedback. If you are interested in our first tests, read this article:
These regular tests help us generate valuable information about the points of user disease and carefully monitor satisfaction and efforts over time.
Each month, product designers present their conclusions, combining them with understanding and data of products managers. This forms what we call the “monthly reports of the team” that help to prioritize the topics of the road map based on criticality and businesses.
The results are widespread with teams, interested parties and leaders of leadership.
Depending on the goals, we can represent the results on the RASY:
Categorized feedback by the user
This allows the teams to quickly identify templates and trends. Comparing the share of various feedback topics, we can put priorities for the most important tasks of the user and provide for decision -making are controlled by data. This may affect the road map of all teams throughout the company, and not just a product in the product (for example, a training team, a team of mentoring, a team of students’ success).
Three best points of the disease for this step
This can directly help prioritize in the team’s road map and determine the key pain points that require deeper analysis or further reconnaissance at the next stage of detection of the product.
Evolution satisfaction and effort After a while
This allows us to correlate satisfaction with users using business heels. For example, if the use speeds fall, we can study the grades of satisfaction and efforts for this step and analyze high -quality feedback to determine potential causes.
It also helps us assess the influence of new issues. For example, whenever we make a change in the funnel, we analyze our “experience of using KPI” to determine whether this reduces efforts and increases satisfaction.
Now we can track this evolution in all detachments and began to set the goals of the teams based on these results:
When starting the first polls, you will probably find some ineffective. Some may not receive enough answers, while others can provide non -special feedback. This is normal – you will not get everything correctly on the first attempt! 🙂
You will need to regularly be in the feedback sources: add new ones, delete ineffective and adjust the placement, channels or questions as necessary.
In OpenClassrooms, we are constantly controlling the feedback sources and appropriately improve our approach.
The impact of continuous research on the product strategy
- Time saving: The collection and analysis of feedback becomes easier. Teams no longer need to start from scratch.
- A deeper understanding of users: Constant analysis improves user understanding and sympathy.
- Blow on the cross team: Understanding affects not only the product road maps, but also the success of customers, sales and marketing.
- Extracing the detection of the problem: Monitoring assessments help determine the trends and take corrective actions before the problems are aggravated.
Key numbers
- 10+ Continuous research folders have been created
- 900+ The reviews are analyzed monthly
- 20+ Effective ideas generated every month, directly affecting the product strategy
