In-product Feedback
UI/UX Design, 2022 - Guild Education
Guild Education provides education benefits to employees of their clients, such as Chipotle, Walmart, or Disney. Employees are able to take advantage of these benefits and go back to school with their employer paying for their education or with tuition reimbursement.
I, along with a product manager, collaborated with a User Voice representative to design a modular solution for gathering feedback so we could use it to improve the product and understand user issues. There was previously no easy way to get direct feedback from users. Adding this experience resulted in our product team gathering feedback to look for trends, catch bugs, and get suggestions for improvement.
Read my Medium article on the user research process for this project.
Main problems
We don’t consistently know when users are confused or are having difficulty navigating Guild throughout the experience.
We are not collecting any self reported user issues: bugs, or requests for new features
We don’t know when users have a great experience with Guild products.
I focused on creating a modular solution that could easily be implemented across the product and easily hidden/shown when needed.
I designed 3 options for the location of the feedback link:
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In the footer
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At the bottom of the page
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On the side
However, I wanted to test them each to make sure users could find them if they wanted to give feedback.
Over 2 click tests with a total of 100 participants, I asked participants, "Where would you click to give feedback on the following website?" I also asked them how easy it was to complete the task and where they would expect to find a feedback link.
"It stands out a little more than the others."
- Participant about the version with the link at the bottom
The version with the most success was the one with the link at the bottom. It had the most successful clicks, was the easiest for users to find, and aligned the most with user's expectations for a feedback link.
Red version (link at the bottom)
Success rate
Test 1: 42% success
Test 2: 32% success
Ease of use rating
Test 1: 82% easy/very easy
Test 2: 60% easy/very easy
Blue version (link in footer)
Success rate
Test 1: 40% success
Test 2: 38% success
Ease of use rating
Test 1: 68% easy/very easy
Test 2: 62% easy/very easy
Yellow version (link on the side)
Success rate
Test 1: 14% success
Test 2: 22% success
Ease of use rating
Test 1: 46% easy/very easy
Test 2: 50% easy/very easy
Thinking of typical websites or desktop apps that you use, where would you expect to give feedback or submit an idea for the product? Why?
50% of participants expected a feedback link to be near the bottom of the page, like near a "Contact us" button.
This also aligns with user preference, where the versions where the link was near the bottom was the most preferred.
Based on user testing, I continued with designing the feedback link on the bottom, defining the specs of the module and mocking up examples of how to implement it on key pages before handing it off to developers.
Conclusion
Doing this project helped me learn how to design a scalable module that could be implemented long after the project was finished without me there. It gave me the opportunity to communicate the design needs through the final files and annotations so anyone could use them.
In the end, this module led to a Slack channel that collected the user feedback coming in, and product managers were able to triage feedback and identify larger improvements to address in their future roadmaps.
