9 Ways User Feedback Helps Companies Identify and Solve Real-World Problems
If a brand excels at keeping its users happy, it already has a firm foundation for success in place. That’s why it’s surprising how few businesses make soliciting user feedback a core component of their design processes.
In this article, we’ll analyze exactly why user research is a necessary part of identifying and solving business problems before they become an even bigger challenge. Through real-world examples, we’ll show you the significant impact user feedback can have on a company’s product development process, and, ultimately, its bottom line.
How User Feedback Helps Companies Identify Problems
Insights from users provide many solutions if evaluated properly. Here are some ways user feedback uncovered — and helped to solve — business problems. You’re able to:
Understand what truly matters to your users. When a company invests in software, it is typically to make some aspect of its users’ lives easier. The only way to truly know whether that purpose has been successful or not is to ask them. Without that understanding, a company can only guess about the return on its investments.
Create more targeted products. User feedback also helps businesses create products that are a more precise fit for what their target audience needs. Understanding what users like and dislike makes it much easier to emphasize the positives and fix the negatives. This results in products that are more impactful for users which means higher adoption rates.
React with agility to shifting consumer preferences. Customer preferences shift over time as new technologies emerge and the marketplace waxes and wanes. Companies that prioritize user research to identify trends increase their staying power by designing products that become more useful as new trends solidify. In this way, user feedback helps companies stay at the cutting-edge of their industries.
Improve customer retention. When a business keeps a finger on the pulse of its audience through user research, its offerings can adjust to customer preferences over time. Happy customers make your products and services a priority when they provide great utility.
What Goes Wrong When Businesses Ignore User Feedback
Just as there are benefits to listening to your users, there are also consequences to ignoring their wants and needs. Read on to learn how to avoid these mistakes.
5. Personal biases influence designs. Oftentimes product designs come from the innovation team, upper management, or some combination of both. However, since these people rarely use the product themselves, they don’t have a sound understanding of what it truly requires to be useful. Without input from users, designs become reflective of a group of people they aren’t intended to serve, thereby reducing their practical usability and efficiency.
6. Agility declines. Being able to adapt to changing circumstances is a critical business capability in the modern era. Exercising this type of agility is a challenge when it’s unclear how a company needs to change to appease shifting consumer demand. That’s precisely what happens when a business doesn’t regularly check in with its users.
7. Costly redesigns become necessary. When a tool is built from the ground up without accurately reflecting the needs of its target audience, costly changes will be needed before the product can be useful. A seemingly insignificant design decision, if foundational, could snowball into a complete rebuild. That’s time and money a company wouldn’t have to spend if it had emphasized user-centered design (UCD) earlier in the process.
8. Users look elsewhere for solutions. Most industries are now incredibly competitive. If a customer isn’t getting what they need from your company, they likely will be able to get it elsewhere. In this way, there is a very direct link between collecting feedback in your design process and customer loyalty.
The same point applies to employee retention for internal products. If other companies are providing a more employee-driven environment, they will go elsewhere for work.
9. Revenue declines. Ultimately it boils down to revenue loss. If you don’t create products that satisfy user needs, you will lose users. If your company loses users, it loses money too.
Examples of User Research Solving Real-World Problems
There are many ways in which research has provided solutions to business problems. Here are just a few examples where exploring the user’s environment, use cases, and sales led to success.
A Credit Union’s Improved Website
Recently we were hired by a credit union that wanted to improve its website experience for customers by incorporating more UX research and design. We used journey mapping, user interviews, click tests, and card sorting to uncover the pain points on the credit union’s website.
Our research found that users were having a hard time understanding the company’s rates and product offering tables. We also learned that there was no clear path to purchase and that these problems led to the site having a high bounce rate.
Our team used its field research to create web pages that were more transparent about fees with clearer paths to purchase. We also created more organized product groupings and helpful links to support a user’s decision-making process instead of detracting from it. With these changes, we reduced the credit union’s bounce rate by 77%.
An Unexpected Environment
An energy company was recently working on a piece of internal software that wasn’t meeting its users’ needs. User research was not an integral part of the initial design process so they were not able to identify the problems that this software needed to solve.
After realizing this was an important piece of the challenge, they conducted interviews with users. The design team learned that the tool was displayed on a large TV screen on the wall instead of a computer monitor. Unfortunately, the interface already did not meet accessibility standards. This scenario made it more apparent how disconnected the tool was from the people it was supposed to serve.
That discovery completely changed the way the company designed the software. They altered their sizing, colors, and typography to account for this unexpected type of usage. The design team also made key information larger to make important events more obviously distinguishable and scannable from a distance.
Users who interacted with the new prototype were excited to have a tool that was more catered to their real-world environment and processes. They felt it would relieve some of their cognitive overload and enable them to spend more time focusing on other key tasks.
This is a great example of how biased decision-making in the design process can lead to inefficient and inaccessible software. If the company had embraced a user-centered design approach from the beginning, they wouldn’t have had to spend so much time and money redesigning the software.
Daito Makes it Easier to Embrace a User-Centric Approach
Daito helps companies derive more data-driven insights from a user-centered design approach. We partner with companies to provide in-depth information about how users are actually interacting with their products.
We perform a vast amount of user research, collect user feedback, synthesize the results, and analyze it to identify noteworthy trend lines. Daito uses this information to provide its clients with actionable solutions to help them design products and tools that retain more customers and improve the efficiency of internal employees.