In years past, I have been part of projects where the business defines top to bottom a web application, develops in a waterfall approach, and delivered what they believe is the best solution possible. The customer then begins to use the application and reports problems or even attempts things that were never planned for by development. The end result is an application that only met a small fraction of customer expectations or is even a complete failure.

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of a customer-centric approach to development. This requires incorporation of several elements to be successful. Here is a quick summary of those topics:

Design Thinking

The premise for a design thinking approach is to think from the customer’s perspective first. It involves a focus on user outcomes and solving for customer pain points. The concept is then validated and adjusted based on customer feedback at several stages along the way. This allows for quick adjustments and confirmation that the user experience is optimal and solving for the customer’s needs.

Agile development

Agile involves following a set of 12 principles that are meant to change the mindset of development teams. This starts with a user story-based approach where incremental development happens with daily scrum checkpoints to check progress and identify blockers. Validation and testing is done along the way in order to fail fast and adjust in order to deliver a higher quality product. Because of the iterative nature, output can be delivered often and with regular improvements based on customer feedback.

Let’s say you employ the 2 above methodologies and begin delivering iterations of a web application. What can you do to ensure the feedback loop continues and drives improvements in the quality of the development output?

Consider the following tools as mechanisms to capture quality feedback and provide several excellent gauges that can help drive quality improvements.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS is a statistic that very quickly can let you gauge customer sentiment for an application. This is a simple statistic where a customer simply selects a value from 0-10 to indicate if they would recommend the application to others. A 0-6 is considered a detractor, a 7-8 is passive, and a 9-10 is promoter. Your NPS is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors and can be a value from -100 to 100. Industry average scores vary, but a good rule of thumb would be that above 40 is a good score and 20-40 needs improvement, while below 20 is poor.

NPS is one of the single most valuable stats since it can very quickly tell you if customers like what is being developed and changing over time by tracking the daily trend. It becomes even more relevant when coupled with verbatim customer feedback below.

Customer Feedback Mechanism

This would be a way to quickly capture a customer’s thoughts when they are presented with NPS or when they encounter a frustrating issue in the application. Typically these verbatim entries are 1-2 sentences and when coupled with some insights on what the customer was doing and where they were in the application, can reveal real world pain points that can be evaluated, categorized, prioritized and addressed by an agile development team.

The net result is the ability to quickly adapt and resolve customer pain points in the application and then confirm the improvement positively impacts the NPS over time.

Mining Search Data (terms and click through rates)

If your application has a search mechanism, you should be analyzing that data as well. It becomes a treasure trove of information telling you what customers are expecting to find and if you are actually delivering content quickly to meet those expectations through the use of click through rates. For example, did the customer use the search multiple times, click through several pages of results, leave, or click a result right away on the first screen. All of this data helps you tune the search and make sure your content is written to meet the expectations of the customers.

Overall Web Stats

There are a lot of stats that can assist with analyzing what users do in an application or a website. However, there are some key ones that are very informative and tell you if the user is achieving their goals. Here are a few that are useful, but this is where you need to be creative and observe what users do to determine what is relevant to track.

  • What is the user time on the site or page?
  • What is the abandoned rate?
  • What is the load time for the content?
  • Are there patterns that develop for when users leave the site?

The Feedback Loop: Listen and Understand

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” –Stephen R. Covey

Too often I encounter teams that either ignore or dismiss customer feedback and never complete that loop of feeding it back into their development cycle and then acting upon that feedback.

Remember, all the interactions a customer has with your application are them telling you what they want. Don’t ignore it. Listen and understand what they are telling you. It will be the most valuable feedback you can hear. If you properly feed it back into development, it will tell you exactly what you need to know to improve and exceed the customer’s expectations.