Startups must collect feedback throughout the life cycle of their products. Feedback needs to be collected during early development, MVP validation, and even during commercialization.
During the MVP and later development stages, perform usability testing. In the ideation stage, you can collect customer research even though you don’t have any product. This involves doing primary and secondary market research. After the product has been commercially launched, user feedback should be conducted continuously for as long as the product is active.
User Feedback and Usability Testing
Usability testing helps startups understand why people are doing what they’re doing. Why do they use one feature more than another? Why did they stop on the previous step? Why is the product used less frequently than before?
During usability testing, you can find out the characteristics of users, including information such as demographics, psychographics, or professional status. You can find out why they behave in a certain way, how you can improve your software product, what they think about your competition, and other questions.
Collecting User Feedback
Collect feedback throughout the entire product lifecycle, including early development stages, MPV validation, and later during the development stages. Every stage gives you valuable feedback and get help create a better product.
Early Development Stages
It can be difficult to collect user feedback during the early development stages since you may not have a product yet. For early-stage validation, follow the lean development methodology, including tactics from The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn if Your Business is a Good Idea When Everyone is Lying to You by Rob Fitzpatrick and The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries to collect valuable user insights.
MVP Validation
After you have a tangible product, user feedback can be collected based on in-person validation and remote feedback methods. Collect this feedback to test the technical questions you have surrounding how the users interact with the software product as well as the viability of the product within its market. You can also evaluate the effectiveness of UX and UI design elements.
Collecting user feedback is an important part of creating and improving a product. To learn more, click here.
