The last thing that I want to cover is
that you make sure that you get feedback
from users every step of the way.
Feedback takes a lot of different forms,
and you've already seen how
you can conduct user research
to inform your business idea.
You might try incorporating
a survey into your product.
You could send these out each week or
month to collect feedback, or
you might even try and embed them
in some way into your product.
Social media is another great way to
monitor early usage of your product, and
have customers connect to your brand.
App ratings, or user ratings, or website
ratings, are another way to understand
quantitatively, and qualitatively
what users think of your product.
One app, which is called Circa News
provides the following guidance on
ratings.
First, they recommend that you
just build a great product.
If you don't build a great product,
users aren't going to give you
good ratings in the first place.
Secondly, don't annoy the users.
You should really only ask them to rate
your product if they've had a good
experience and they've used
the product for a little bit.
And finally, Circa News recommends
that you ask nicely, and
maybe even reward your users for
rating the app.
For more details about their advice,
check out the article,
which is linked in the instructor notes.
Finally, you should make
customer support everyone's job.
You might have a dedicated email or
chat service that lets users
talk directly to employees.
Former CCO, and co-founder of Kayak,
Paul English, went so
far as putting the very loud phone
in the middle of the engineers.
He reasoned that if the same
calls kept coming in,
then the team would work quickly
to resolve the problems.
This would likely resolve the same
problems that other users were facing.
No matter which strategy you use,
you should think about
when you'll intercept users and
how you will respond to them.
Your actions and
improvements to your product can speak
just as loudly as individual follow ups.
But do remember that these
experiences also contribute
to the user's experience and
their perception of the product.