Testing, testing: How Prolific can help you gain useful user feedback

If you’re a Product Manager or UX Manager, you’ll know how critical it is to run your designs past the people who’ll be using your product - before you spend time, money, effort, and energy on build, and as you roll out upgrades and updates.

Prolific can empower you to do just that – without the countless, costly iterations that can push back launch dates (and make your job increasingly stressful).

Read on to discover how to get the most out of your user feedback, and how we can help.

Why is user feedback important?

When you’re deeply involved in creating or improving a product, it can be hard to see how it looks, feels, and works from an outsider’s perspective. The solution? Quizzing one of those outsiders.

By asking people within your target audience for feedback, you can learn what they think of certain features, which requests or issues keep coming up, and where gaps in functionality appear.

It’s also a great way of showing potential customers that you value what they say, fostering a sense of loyalty and trust.

Building software for your own employees? Don’t forget to gauge their sentiment on how smooth the onboarding process is, how prevalent new feature adoption is, and how comfortable people are with using apps in general.

This way, not only will your product be awesome, but your digital adoption will flow smoothly, too.

How can I collect feedback?

There are lots of different types of feedback, including:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) - Asking customers how likely they are to recommend your product to a friend or colleague, on a scale of 0-10 – then sorting them into ‘Promoters’, ‘Passives’ and ‘Detractors’ based on their response.
• Customer satisfaction rating (CSAT) - Usually requested after interacting with support staff or another transactional event.
• Feature requests - Getting customers to feed back on feature enhancements or desired functionality to assess market demand and decide what to build next.
• Release feedback - Gained after a new product or feature has launched, to find out whether it’s loved, liked, or loathed (hopefully not the latter!).

We suggest gathering these insights through:

Surveys

Whether in-app, to be taken while users are engaged with your product, or pulse, sent periodically to learn sentiment over time. Question formats can include picklists, multi-select options, Likert scales (more on those in this post) and open text.

User testing

While you watch the person giving your product a go. This can give you a first-hand overview of which areas are intuitive, which are tricky to navigate, and which need revising – pronto.

Focus groups and interviews

With a small cohort of users or on-to-one, capturing candid, unfiltered feedback. Just stay mindful of groupthink.

Internal feedback capture tools

Built directly into your product, allowing users to voluntarily submit feedback and product requests – publicly putting them at the heart of your product.

When’s the right time?

When gathering user feedback, it’s vital you appear more interested, curious, and open than needy, insecure and… well, obsessed.

While showing your users you care about their thoughts can only be a positive thing, spamming them certainly isn’t.

We suggest you (gently) ask for input:

• During pilot or beta testing
• Straight after onboarding
• After a task or transaction
• When a user has asked for help
• When a user upgrades or downgrades their account
• When a user isn’t making the most of certain features

Letting users come to you is another fantastic way of gaining feedback without being that person.

How can Prolific help?

We don’t mean to brag, but we receive some incredible user feedback on our own platform in this exact area.

Prolific’s a strong choice for conducting your research thanks to our:

High-quality, accurate data

Our 130,000+ participants are continuously vetted and carefully curated – so you can rest assured they’ll give you useful, thoughtful feedback.

Fantastic participants

We pride ourselves on having an enthusiastic, engaged pool of English speakers, treated ethically and compensated fairly.

Specific samples

You can filter your participant pool down to your exact demographic with our inbuilt screeners, or build your own from scratch based on what matters most to you and your product.

Quick responses

Iterate designs, test features, and make data-driven decisions faster than you ever imagined, with thorough responses ready to analyze in hours – not days or weeks.

Honest, upfront pricing

No nasty surprises or sneaky fees here. With our simple, transparent costs, you can build our solution into your budget (whatever that may be).

A scalable platform

Interview 10 people. Run tests with 30. Survey 1,000. However many people you want to hear from, and however you want to hear from them, we’ll make it happen. Your product, your choice.

Plenty of collection options

All those data-collection methods we mentioned above? We’ve got them covered. And we integrate seamlessly with tools for heatmaps and eye-tracking, which show where users are clicking, looking, and more.

Sound good? Then let’s get going. Sign up with Prolific and start collecting valuable user feedback today, or speak to our friendly sales team about your specific needs.

‍