5 Ways We‘re Improving Thanks to Your Feedback

As a full-stack developer, I know how powerful feedback can be for steering product improvements. When we understand the needs, desires, and pain points of our users, we can craft solutions that really move the needle on their experience and success.

That‘s why our team is so committed to seeking out and really listening to feedback from our amazing community of users. We gather input through a variety of channels including:

• In-app surveys and feedback modules
• User interviews and usability test sessions
• Monitoring of support tickets and social media mentions
• Analysis of product usage data and behavioral signals
• Regular check-ins with our power users and beta testers

This combination of quantitative and qualitative data gives us a robust, 360-degree view of how folks are using our product and where we can improve.

So what are we doing with all that feedback? Quite a lot, it turns out! I want to highlight 5 key areas where our users‘ input has shaped major enhancements. Let‘s dive in.

1. Improving Onboarding and Getting Started

Signing up for a new service can be daunting. There are new paradigms and workflows to learn. It‘s not always obvious how to take the first step. Many new users were telling us they felt lost when trying to get started with our platform.

We knew we had to improve that initial experience and get users to their "aha" moment faster. The first step was to streamline the signup flow itself. By redesigning the forms and removing unnecessary fields, we were able to increase completion rates by 25% and shave 45 seconds off the average signup time.

But getting an account is just the beginning. We needed to better orient users and help them take meaningful next steps. So we completely overhauled our onboarding tutorial to be more interactive and relevant to a user‘s specific goals.

Instead of a generic product walkthrough, new users are now guided through setting up their first project in a way that showcases key features in a real-world context. Completion rates for the tutorial have jumped by 30% and we‘ve seen a 10% increase in week 1 retention for those who finish it.

Finally, to help new users experience quick wins, we introduced a library of project templates. These "starter kits" provide pre-configured setups for common use cases that can be customized as needed. Early data shows that users who begin with a template are twice as likely to complete their first project and 3 times as likely to upgrade to a paid plan.

2. Enhancing the User Interface and Experience

The feedback on this one was loud and clear: our UI was overdue for a refresh. The design was cluttered and dated. Information was hard to find. Workflows felt clunky, especially on mobile. It was time for a major overhaul.

We began by defining a new, unified design language. Working closely with our UX team, we developed a streamlined system of colors, typography, spacing, and other key building blocks. We then created an extensive UI kit containing hundreds of consistently styled components, from buttons and form elements to navigation bars and data visualizations.

Rolling this out across the entire application was a significant undertaking. In total, we updated over 100 individual screens and 250+ UI elements. But the impact has been substantial. In a before/after survey, users rated the new interface 4.3/5 on ease of use (compared to 3.5 previously) and 4.6/5 on visual appeal (up from 3.3).

We didn‘t just focus on aesthetics, but also re-examined the overall information architecture based on usage data and user feedback. We found that almost 80% of sessions involved the same 4-5 core features, so we redesigned the main navigation and home screen to make those key tasks more prominent and reduce the number of clicks needed to complete them.

The result? Engagement with those top features has increased by an average of 25% and support tickets related to navigation difficulties have decreased by over 40%.

Of course, these days a huge percentage of web traffic comes via mobile devices. So while revamping the UI in general, we put special focus on mobile usability. Our design team adopted a mobile-first methodology and all new UI components are built to scale gracefully across screen sizes. We also optimized gestures and interactions for touch interfaces.

Thanks to these efforts, key user journeys like onboarding and core product flows now have mobile completion rates within 5% of their desktop equivalents. And in a recent survey of mobile users, 90%+ rated the experience as "good" or "very good."

3. Adding New Features and Capabilities

Our users are an inventive bunch, and they‘ve shared tons of great ideas for new capabilities that would make our product more powerful. While we can‘t implement all of them, we definitely try to prioritize the most requested features that align with our product vision.

One of the top requests was for better data exporting options. Users frequently need to pull data out of our platform for analysis in other tools or inclusion in reports. Previously we only supported basic CSV exports, but thanks to user feedback we‘ve now added the ability to export to Excel, JSON, and XML as well. Even better, you can now fine-tune the exact columns and data ranges to include and apply filters to get just the subset you need.

Another popular request was for more granular access controls and user permissions. Many of our customers have large teams collaborating in our platform and they need to be able to define specific roles and privileges. In our latest release, we introduced custom user roles that allow account admins to specify exactly which features and datasets each user can access. This has been a huge hit with our enterprise clients who can now ensure compliance with their internal security policies.

We‘ve also heard from many users who wanted more ability to automate repetitive tasks and complex workflows. Our power users are saving hours every week thanks to major enhancements we‘ve made to our macro and scripting engine. It now supports dozens of new commands and integrates with popular automation tools like Zapier. One of our startup customers was able to cut their weekly data processing time by 50%+ by setting up automated macros.

In addition to big marquee features like these, we‘re also constantly shipping smaller enhancements based on user suggestions. From new keyboard shortcuts to improved search filters to customizable notification settings, we‘ve made hundreds of tweaks to help users work more efficiently. Each individual change may only save a few seconds, but they really add up – and show our users that we‘re listening to every piece of feedback.

4. Increasing Performance and Reliability

All the great features in the world don‘t matter much if the application is slow or constantly crashing. Unsurprisingly, performance and reliability are major themes in the feedback we receive. Over the past year, we‘ve undertaken several major initiatives to improve the speed, scalability, and stability of our platform.

On the backend, we‘ve made significant investments in our infrastructure. We re-architected our core database to leverage a distributed SQL cluster, allowing us to scale both storage and performance horizontally as data volumes increase. We‘ve seen a 50% improvement in average query response times as a result.

We also migrated our application servers to a containerized microservices architecture orchestrated by Kubernetes. Besides making deployments and scaling easier, this has allowed us to isolate and optimize performance-critical services. For I/O heavy workflows, we can now provision 10x the CPU and memory resources compared to our legacy monolithic architecture.

Of course, the user experience depends just as much on frontend performance as what‘s happening on the backend. To that end, we‘ve implemented an aggressive program of frontend optimization. By migrating to HTTP/2, leveraging CDN caching, minifying and bundling assets, and lazy loading non-critical resources, we‘ve cut average page load times in half from 2.4 seconds to 1.2 seconds (and there‘s still room for improvement).

We know that our users rely on our platform to be highly available, so we‘ve also strengthened our reliability and monitoring capabilities. We now run a "chaos engineering" program that intentionally injects faults into our staging environment to proactively identify and fix weaknesses. We‘ve implemented comprehensive APM across all key services to identify performance bottlenecks. And we‘ve set up automated failover and disaster recovery processes to minimize downtime in the event of an outage.

The results speak for themselves. Over the past 12 months, our aggregated error rates have decreased by 60%, mean time to recovery (MTTR) for incidents has dropped by 45%, and our overall uptime stands at 99.95% (up from 99.5% the previous year).

5. Improving Support and Issue Resolution

No matter how much we improve the product itself, questions and issues are inevitable. And when users need help, they want fast, effective support from knowledgeable experts. Over the past few months, we‘ve significantly leveled up our support game based on feedback from users.

First off, we nearly doubled the size of our support team, bringing on board a crew of talented new support engineers. Every one of them has gone through a rigorous 6-week training program on our platform, including detailed sessions with the product and engineering teams. By the time they hit the front lines, they are true experts capable of handling even the toughest technical questions.

We‘ve also completely revamped our help center and documentation. The new knowledge base is meticulously organized and searchable, with in-depth articles on every major feature and workflow. We‘ve also created dozens of step-by-step tutorial videos to visually walk through common tasks and troubleshooting steps. Since launching the new help center, we‘ve seen a 30% increase in usage and a corresponding 20% decrease in support tickets.

To help users get answers even faster, we‘ve rolled out a contextual help widget directly inside the application. Now relevant knowledge base articles automatically appear based on what page you‘re on and what action you‘re taking. And if you can‘t find what you need, you can open a support ticket right from the widget and it will automatically include key diagnostic info to help our team quickly reproduce and resolve your issue.

We know that responsiveness is just as important as resolution, so we‘ve been working hard to improve our support SLAs. Our average first response time is down to 45 minutes (from 3 hours a year ago) and we resolve 80% of tickets within 24 hours (up from only 45% a year ago). We‘ve achieved this by streamlining our issue triage and escalation processes, and by giving our frontline agents more tools and training to resolve issues themselves.

Finally, we meet our users where they are by proactively offering support via the channels they frequent. Our support team now actively monitors social media hashtags and brand mentions to identify and assist users in need. Designated "community champions" engage with users in our discussion forums to provide expert guidance and gather product feedback. And we‘ve set up a "bat phone" process to quickly escalate urgent issues identified through executive channels.

Conclusion

Gathering feedback can be a humbling experience. It shines a light on all the areas where your product falls short. But for a development team committed to continuous improvement, that feedback is pure gold. It gives us a roadmap for turning a good application into an indispensable one.

As you can see, the input from our users has been an essential driver in every area of our platform – from product to engineering to support. And the results are measurable:

• Our NPS has increased by 15 points
• Average 7-day retention is up 20%
• Weekly active users have grown by 35%
• MRR from upsells and expansions has increased 25%

Beyond the quantitative impact, the qualitative feedback we‘re hearing is even more gratifying. I‘ll leave you with just a couple quotes from customers that validate why we do what we do:

"The new features and improved speed have been real game-changers for our team. We‘re getting so much more done in less time." – Sarah B., Marketing Manager

"The documentation is so clear and the support team is amazing. I feel like I have a whole extra team supporting my work." – Jared S., Data Analyst

A huge thank you to all the users who have taken the time to share a piece of their mind with us. We quite literally couldn‘t do it without you. And if you‘re reading this, please keep that feedback coming! We review every piece of input and I promise it makes a difference.

In fact, here‘s a little preview of some goodies we‘re cooking up based on recent feedback:

• A major expansion of our API and webhooks capabilities
• Tighter integration with popular third-party tools like Slack and Salesforce
• Advanced data visualization and exploration features
• Even deeper customization options for the UI and workflow

Stay tuned for these and many more improvements coming your way – powered by your ideas. Check back here for regular updates or subscribe to our product announcements. And as always, we want to hear from you. Just hit that feedback button and let us know how we can keep making your experience better and better.