How to Collect Valuable User Insights to Drive Product Growth

Product managers spend an incredible amount of time digging for user insights to uncover patterns that will drive product growth.

What if there’s a system and set of tools you can use to make this process much easier? Imagine the time and resources you’ll conserve and channel to other activities instead!

Read on to learn how to collect and analyze valuable insights, almost on autopilot.

What are user insights?

User insights sum up your users’ perceptions and feelings about your product or service.

These insights are distilled by synthesizing and analyzing feedback collected from different sources and in-app user behavior. Whether positive or negative, user insights should be presented in simple ways that teams can act on for better decision-making.

Why are user research insights important for the product design process?

User research lays the foundation for good product design. With proper research, all your decisions will be data-backed. In other words, you’re not designing your product from your head, but doing what customers actually like.

Companies make the mistake of being too product-centric, neglecting customer needs and market demands. Accessing quality user insights helps to avoid this bias.

Additionally, user research uncovers friction points you otherwise wouldn’t have known about. Addressing those areas of concern will smoothen the user journey, helping you reduce churn. Customer satisfaction also improves as a result.

How to collect valuable user insights?

There are many sources for collecting customer data. And you’ll often have to combine information from different places to get a holistic view of customer behavior and needs.

This section shows you important data sources and how to use them.

Collect user feedback with in-app surveys

Use in-app surveys like NPS, CSAT, etc., at different stages of the customer journey to collect information on the user experience, identify friction points, etc.

One advantage of in-app surveys is that they help you collect both qualitative and quantitative data with ease.

For example, you can use the NPS scale to quickly collect customer loyalty data (quantitative) and optionally follow up with an open-ended question to understand the reasons behind low scores (qualitative).

Gather qualitative data with user interviews

Feedback surveys have their pace, but nothing beats real-time conversations with customers. You’ll uncover spoken and unspoken insights you won’t see in survey forms.

However, note that user interviews demand more from users than merely filling out a short survey. So you want to do everything to ensure customers don’t turn you down.

You can offer incentives like extra credits on your platform, a voucher, etc. Telling customers upfront that it will be brief and they’re free to choose the meeting time also works.

Create a modal or a slideout inviting your users for an interview in-app where they will be more willing to give you a positive answer.

How to make the most of user interviews? Ask specific, open-ended questions that will allow the user to give answers beyond “yes” or “no.”

Let users provide feedback on demand

Complementing your feedback surveys with always-on feedback widgets lets you receive genuine responses from your users that have some valuable insights.

Create a resource center with different educational resources, and complement them with a feedback badge to offer true support.

An always-on survey gives users the confidence that their voice matters and that they can fill out the form anytime they encounter a friction point. Your customers will fill out the survey when they’re most ready and they’re more likely to give accurate responses that way.

Get specific user insights from customer-facing teams

You can’t ignore customer-facing teams when collecting user insights. These people interact daily with your customers. They know their pain points, desires, motivations, etc.

It’s also safe to say your frontline teams are the best for giving context to user feedback. For instance, if your survey shows users don’t like a particular feature, someone from your support team can explain why because they’ve probably received complaints about that feature during support interactions.

So, meet with frontline teams like support, sales reps, customer success, etc., to discuss your customers. Aim to collect insights like dissatisfaction reasons, feature suggestions, user needs, friction points, etc.

Track how users engage with your product using heatmaps

A heatmap is a visual representation of how visitors interact with your website or app. You can use it to see how different user segments engage with your product features and use the data for better decision-making.

Simply tag UI elements to track actions users perform in the app and analyze the highest and lowest interactions within the builder.

Heatmaps can show what part of your product your customers engage with more, and areas they’re avoiding.

Paired with additional information about user behavior, this can uncover user insights about your product design, features, etc.

How to analyze the collected data to gain valuable insights

The next step after collecting user data is to visualize and analyze it to process the raw data to gain useful insights. Let’s see how to do that.

Tag NPS responses to analyze feedback data

After you have conducted the NPS survey, use response tagging to get qualitative data and highlight the areas of the user insights that need your attention more than others.

At a glance, you can easily tell what customers love about your product and see areas they wish you would improve.

For the survey above, the highest response was about the app’s UI. An NPS score of 43 shows some users believe the UI needs improvement. You can follow up on that and try to see how to solve the problem.

Another example: three responses said the tool was affordable, while one person thinks it was too expensive. With the majority believing that the platform is affordable, it could be that the person that responded contrarily is on a mismatched plan or a negative persona for your business. You could reach out to learn more.

Segment customers based on their survey responses

Well-defined segments will give you a more granular understanding of your user base.

By grouping users based on their responses, you make it easier to study their behavior and glean further insight. This allows you to create personalized in-app experiences for them and improve their overall experience.

Identify themes, patterns, and relationships

This approach is similar to user segmentation but more in-depth.

When you consider the collected data, you’ll observe trends and patterns in the responses, so take time to categorize them properly. Then pair the responses with in-app customer behavior and product usage data to make them more cohesive.

For instance, you might notice some users complain about missing features. Digging further, you could uncover that they all have the same JTBD and use your product regularly.

With this clearer representation, it becomes easier to commit to building the feature they need—at least you know a handful of users need them, so your efforts won’t go wasted.

It’s difficult to access these analytics without a third-party tool (unless you spend untold amounts of resources coding every solution). Tools like Userpilot allow you to track product usage, group users by shared characteristics, set product goals, etc.

How to collect and act on user insights using Userpilot

Userpilot is a no-code product growth platform with features to help you collect and make sense of user feedback.

Here’s a rundown of how to use our platform to collect user insight:

• Build in-app surveys code-free: Userpilot enables you to collect qualitative and quantitative data with ease. No coding is involved; we have plug-and-play templates you can customize as you want. What’s more, Userpilot also allows you to automate the process. In other words, you can set the surveys to be triggered at a specific frequency or defined points in the user journey.
• Use feature tagging and tag heatmaps to collect data about user engagement: You don’t have to rely on surveys alone to learn about customers. Use feature tagging and heatmaps to see how customers are behaving on your platform.

• Advanced segmentation and analytics: Segment users based on similar characteristics and get granular with the insights. Then implement our analytics feature to derive meaning from the data uncovered.

Conclusion

You owe it to your company and customers to generate useful insights for proper decision-making. And this article has shown you a proper framework for generating data and turning it into valuable user insights. Go ahead and implement the strategies discussed.

And as you do so, keep in mind that this isn’t a one-time thing. Customer feedback should be collected regularly to ensure users are always happy with the product.

Looking for a no-code tool to help you collect user insights easily? Try Userpilot! Book a demo call with our team and get started.