Designing a feedback strategy and mechanism to inform the development of nsw.gov.au
Product and service feedback is not sought, managed or documented, exposing a gap in the understanding of our users experience with the products and services we provide. By building a feedback strategy and mechanism, we enable better visibility of our users experience. This leads to greater satisfaction with the nsw.gov.au product, and ultimately greater outcomes for the people of NSW.
My role
Design and research of the experience and service for end-users and internal teams.
Support team
Researcher, Business Analyst, Specialist product teams.
Highlights
- Development of a holistic feedback strategy and mechanism; incorporating various methods for active and passive feedback collection.
- Design and implementation of a recurring feedback survey, generating an insights report to track the state of user experience.
- Implementation of a feedback widget and feedback form in the Help Centre.
- Design of governance processes to manage and respond to feedback, including a feedback repository.
Overview: Feedback strategy development
The result of an audit uncovered risks relating to feedback and product development. These risks centred around ongoing user frustration around the pace of feature delivery, and a black hole where there was no formal avenue for users to provide feedback, resulting in feedback being provided across various channels, and not being connected or addressed appropriately. Ultimately, this led to building user frustration that posed a risk to the programs funding:
- No process or strategy to collect, manage, and utilise feedback to improve user experience with products and services.
- Whilst feedback is informal received, without governance, the feedback was often left un-actioned, compounding user frustration over time.
- Product development and prioritisation did not consider user input when prioritising feature development and bugs, effecting the value of work.
- User sentiment was not measured.
Measuring sentiment: Active feedback collection using targeted surveys
A recurring survey was designed to actively collect feedback at critical junctions of the user’s journey.
Audiences were segmented, with skip logic being used to capture relevant responses dependant on user role. For example, CMS editors were asked questions focussed on their CMS experience and support they receive; senior staff were asked about their sentiment towards the program, costs and value.
From these surveys, I was able to generated insights reports highlighting themes, and track sentiment across user groups.
Creating a safe space to encourage feedback: Passive feedback collection with forms and widgets
Passive customer feedback is equally valuable and authentic since it also captures implicit feedback. Alongside the surveys, multiple passive feedback mechanisms were design and implemented to gather relevant and focussed feedbackwithout the risk of inducing survey fatigue.
A widget was deployed within the Help Centre, and Feedback forms were developed with links from the CMS directing users to the form, providing a more complete picture of the customer journey.
Ensuring feedback makes an impact: Governance processes and repository
Without processes and guidance on how to collectively manage and respond to feedback, the strategy can lose its impact. Key to the success of the feedback strategy and mechanism was a repository to collect and collate themes from feedback, review value and severity and assign responsibilities.
Outcomes and impact
Informed product roadmap
The feedback provided clear guidance for the product roadmap, ensuring that future developments were aligned with user needs and expectations.
Tracking of user sentiment
The surveys provided us with the ability to analyse and track user sentiment over time, and look into specific agencies experiences comparatively.
Improved connection with users
Just by connecting with our users, we are signalling that we are open and listening to them. Qualitative feedback indicated an improvement in trust and connection with our users. Our user base also continued to provide more feedback, observing a 10% increase in the response rate between surveys.
New insights to the user journey
The surveys and subsequent interviews enabled us with new insight into previously hidden steps of their journey through the migration onto the platform, allowing us to map out the journey more accurately and address points of friction.
Challenges
No feedback strategy or mechanism
Whilst the program received ad-hoc feedback occasionally, there were no governance procedures to instruct how we manage and respond to feedback. Without this, user frustration was often compounded with the lack of formal avenues for them to provide feedback. This created a gap in our understanding of users, and created unnecessary frustration for users, and internal teams.
Missing piece for product development and feature prioritisation
Product development did not consider user input when prioritising feature development and fixing bugs, resulting in a misalignment of value with the work that was undertaken.