How To Get 700% More User Feedback For Your App

In the early stages of developing an app, you need to get as much feedback from your users as possible. Placing a prominent link to a feedback form will help but you can go a lot further to improve the amount of feedback “conversions” you receive.

When developing our Kanbanchi app we were convinced we could get more user feedback, so We’d like to share some experiments that we did.

We needed to climb inside a user’s mind and try to find what it was that would spur them to leave a comment or two about their user experience. Here’s what we found….

How to increase feedback form visits

We started out with a standard “Send Feedback or Report Problems” link in the bottom right-hand corner of the application. The user numbers at that time were small and feedback was, not surprisingly, scarce.

Then we came up with the idea of replacing the text link with a “listening man” icon – to show users that we are really listening to what they have to say.

This increased the feedback pop-up opening rate by 250%. The number of messages from users increased too, but the quality of feedback varied.

We wondered what we could do about that. Perhaps we needed to be more precise with what we were asking?

How to improve feedback quality

With this in mind, we replaced a generic:

“Use this form to send your comments or report any problems”

with:

“Please let us know what next top 3 features you would like us to work on? We will be grateful for any other feedback!”

This has, in our own subjective judgment, increased the quality of our feedback by 300% and made it much easier for users to provide us with their thoughts.

But then our “listening man”icon started to annoy some of our users, who complained that they were not comfortable doing their work when somebody was “constantly looking at them” and that the face was “spooky” and so on!

So we changed to a more neutral and, most importantly, “socially acceptable” smiley feedback icon.

That small change cost us more than a 200% drop in feedback window opening and a similar drop in the number of feedback instances generated. Even though the smiley was still performing 50-60% better than a simple text link, we needed to try something else…

Could we beat the “listening man”? Yes we could!

Making it personal

When we next added new functionality to Kanbanchi we decided to display our own faces on the Feedback button with a personal message, and see how that was received.

Now every time a user logs in there is a different face and personal message. For example:

Hi, I’m Alex. I’m a UI designer for Kanbanchi, please let me know if you have ideas about how we can improve the Kanbanchi interface…

The impact? We actually had to go back to the smiley face four days after the experiment started because we were inundated with feedback and could not respond to all users

The feedback window opening rate has shot up from 20-25 per day on average to 500 in the first day (perhaps due to novelty factor) and then leveled out to around 120 per day.

That week we received 700% more feedback responses than normal. This is how it looked in Google Analytics:

So what’s the moral of the story?

It certainly helps to experiment – your feedback rates will probably depend to some degree on the nature of your app and your audience. But our experience has made it clear that people respond better to personal rather than impersonal requests.

You can increase your feedback rates by personalising the message to your users and talking to them in a friendly tone, requesting their honest input. Focus not only on getting them to open the feedback window but also to leave high quality, precise, and relevant feedback that helps you improve your app.