Happy: A Feedback-Website
When working with clients, not everything could goes as expected. Feedback is important for companies to improve their products or services.
Feedback are important for companies to improve their products or services.
To face this problem and get feedback after every project, I created a feedback website (codename Happy). Clients can answer some simple questions there according to the project they did with our company. The solution to create a website seems close, but surveys are mostly a painful task and people don’t like it. And that’s exactly the challenge: to change this.
That’s also why I don’t like to call it a survey site, instead I call it a feedback site. Which sounds less painful and more productive.
I don’t like to call it a survey site, instead I call it a feedback site.
But how do you get every client to submit their true feedback? How to decrease the bounce rate? How do you get client happiness through this tool?
Solution
In my opinion, a user-centered site could help a lot solving the problem. That’s what I’m going to show more detailed below. But just a great site doesn’t solve all problems we’re facing. As soon as the client enters the page, we can handle it with a great experience, decrease bounce rate and try to force the customer to submit true feedbacks.
But first, how do we get a client to our page? A solution may be to reward the client. Give them a discount on your next project, for example. Place the link to your feedback site to a prominent place on your invoice and give the client a follow-up mail.
Most survey sites are a pain to use. They may not work on mobile, you can’t input your feedback easily, you don’t know in which step of the feedback process you are or there are just too many questions you won’t answer. These are all problems a lot of pages suffer from.
Mobile-first
To face the first problem, I decided to do a mobile-first approach on this project. This will not only make sure that the website works on a smartphone. It also makes sure that the site is kept to its minimum — also on desktop.
Show the progress
To make sure, the client always knows where he/she is, I added a progress bar at the very top of the page. This bar is always visible and informs the user which progress he/she already made and how many steps are left.
Ask easy questions
If we ask complex and long questions, the natural reaction users do is that they leave the page and never return. That’s the last thing we want.
Just ask the most important questions and keep them as simple as possible.
Following this, we just ask the most important questions and keep them as simple as possible. The number of questions depends on the size of the project. For our standard projects sizes, more than 8 questions are too much.
Make it play- and colorful
I wanted to make the site as delightful to use a possible. So I added bright colors with a slight gradient to it. I also added animations, which makes the page fun to use. The buttons received a cool hover effect, which doesn’t distract but is fun to use. When transforming to the next page, they get a nice slide effect to clearly communicate a page change. The progress bar at the top also moves seamlessly forward as you proceed to the next page.
Consistency is very important to keep the user engaged with the page.
Consistency is very important to keep the user engaged with the page. We can be playful, but we need to keep a specified structure.
Remember information
In case a customer leaves the page and comes back later, I store the process and will ask them on their return if they want to continue or start new from the beginning.
Another reason, why I decided to store pieces of information, was that a user can return to the feedback page after a second project and don’t want to insert his/her contact information again.
While I was thinking about contact information, I asked myself: “Do we really need to ask the user for contact information?”. No, we don’t, but we could improve ourselves better based on the feedback if we knew. When it’s possible for us to assign a specific feedback to a specific project/customer, we know exactly what the customers reactions are. We don’t need to guess or just make a general statistic about client satisfaction. If we force the client to input their information, it’s possible that they quit the browser and we don’t gather any information at all. Following this thoughts, I decided to collect contact information, but optionally. Below the form I just placed a link to skip this step.
Reflection
I think by improving the user experience of a site, it’s possible to change the users’ personal approach to a specific topic, e.g surveys.
It’s important to see everything from the point of view of a client.
In this project, it was especially important to see everything from the point of view of a client to achieve the desired feedbacks. I learned that user-centered design isn’t always difficult to handle and just throws stones in your way. By really diving into the topic you can come up with solutions, which are a win-win for both parties, the client and also the designer.
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Marc Wieland
WordPress. Front-End Development. UX. Cinematography. Landscape Photography. Time-Lapse Video.
