Give your customers the megaphoneHere at Sweetbridge, we believe in building with our community, rather than for them. Our product development process utilizes feedback that users submit via surveys and works that feedback into future iterations of the product. If there’s something our community loves, it’s there to stay. If there’s something our community dislikes, it’s our mission to improve that experience.Sounds simple, right? As we look across many digital products and consumer goods companies, this connection is not as common as one would think. Given its rarity, we find it pivotal to discuss our user-driven feedback loop and the benefits this allows our project and our community. We’re excited about what the future landscape of blockchain products would look like if others begin to implement similar methodologies into their development process.We Are Not The ExpertsWe learned pretty quickly that a good User Experience (UX) designer knows they’re not an expert. I’m sure we’ve all encountered a beautifully designed interface that was frankly very difficult to use. Shedding the weight of “having to have all the answers” is freeing and critical to the design process. At the end of the day, your user is the expert on the experiences you’re building. It’s for them. They feel the pains. They can help you build a better experience if there’s a feedback loop that allows them to do so.One thing we’re consistently asked by people in the blockchain community is,Do UX designers need to know blockchain?Our answer is always emphatically, “No.” They do need to be experts on what users find difficult not only in our applications, but also, in other leading blockchain applications. If you’ve ever setup a wallet for digital currency, you know that the first time can be unfortunately confusing and frankly nerve-wracking. There’s warning messages everywhere, multiple steps with very little clarity on how many steps there will be, no direction as to what comes next and in the end, very little positive confirmation on what was done correctly.Bonobos, a men’s clothing website, multi-step checkout exampleContrast that experience with a traditional, multi-step checkout process on your favorite shopping website. There’s clear indication on whether you’ve completed a step correctly, what step of the process you’re in at the moment, and what step is coming next. That transparency gives the user a sense of comfort and familiarity.Sweetbridge Wallet setup (early wireframe)When we gathered feedback on the wallet creation process, what users most desired was the ability to clearly understand the steps of the process. Frankly, we would have never thought of approaching our wallet setup feature this way. This is why it’s so important for everyone to experience the pains and gather feedback so we can create better experiences.Imagine setting up a wallet for the first time where things were clearly explained and you felt secure? You’re likely to be a loyal proponent of that product when someone asks you, “What wallet should I use?” This is our goal: deliver positive experiences so this community and amazing technology can continue to grow.As a User Experience team, we start our process using the best practices of design, but we’re more excited about refining those designs and our product through user feedback.This reinforces empathy (arguably one of our most important team values) for our users and ultimately creates a better product. We find this empathy and sense of community is especially critical in blockchain technologies.Why Is Community Feedback Important In Blockchain Products?We’re building in a fishbowl and we like itIn the world of blockchain, we find ourselves operating under pretty interesting circumstances. The way we like to describe it is that we’re creating in a fishbowl. This is like developing the Internet, if everyone had the Internet. Back then, the general public did not have a view into the vast amounts of companies trying to leverage the technology. We didn’t get to see the successes, failures, good investments and bad investments that happened in the infancy of the Internet.Today, it’s all out in the open; how much a company raised, the vision they’re promising, the progress of their products, etc. We as a community are waiting anxiously to have those visions fulfilled and receive value from these companies we’ve invested in. This ultimately places a burden on those teams to deliver and deliver well.Here at Sweetbridge, we view this not as a burden but as an opportunity. An opportunity to make commitments to our community and include people who’ve invested their time and hard-earned money in the fulfillment of those commitments. An opportunity to take a complex technology, get it into people’s hands, and have it operate the way they want.How do we make this happen? Let’s dive in…The SurveyWe used a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey, a standard set by industry leaders of digital products and consumer goods (Amazon.com, American Express, Procter & Gamble, Microsoft), to measure a consumer’s satisfaction with their experience.The FormatStep 1: A customer receives an email inquiring “How likely are you to X product (or X brand) to a friend ?”Step 2: After selecting a from the scale, customers encounter a second open-ended feedback question asking “Tell us a bit more about why you chose X score?”Calculating The ScoreThe response is a score from 0 to 10. Based on the score respondents are categorized as follows:Score 9–10: PromotersScore 7–8: PassivesScore 0–6: DetractorsYour overall NPS score is then calculated as: (% of Promoters) — (% of Detractors)The max NPS score is 100 (positive experience), the min score is -100 (negative experience)Analyzing the Score & ResponsesThe open-ended feedback given by the customer is normalized to discover trends based on keywords within the responses. Each keyword (trend) is given its own NPS score to help a business determine the factors that are positively and negatively impacting their customer experience.Example: A score of 70 for the keyword (trend) “price” would tell you that price is contributing to positive experiences. Conversely, a score of -10 for the word “price” would tell you your products price is contributing to negative experiencesWant to learn more about the NPS methodology? Read more in this book written by its creator.Where Do We Go with the Data From Here?Having visibility into specific trends/parts of your experience that are negatively impacting your score allows you to focus on implementing features, messaging, etc. to solve the issue.Overtime, you can track the movement of that trend (keyword) to see how successful you are in improving that aspect of the experienceExample: If your score for “price” is a -10, you could enact a price reduction initiative. If in the weeks (yes it can happen that fast) following your price reduction test the score for the trend “price” improves to a 40, this indicates that your initiative was successful at improving your customer’s experience.Creating these types of initiatives based on NPS can apply to much more than things like price. On the consumer goods side, companies have used this to alter aspects of their physical product and packaging. On the digital product side, we’ve found that customers give you more specifics than you’d expect around particular existing features or features they may desire.Excited to get this up and running at your own company? We use a company called Delighted to send the surveys, normalize the data, and calculate our scores & trends over time.Feedback feeds real resultsBenefits of This SurveyYou can surmise from the aforementioned breath of NPS business applications that this could lead to countless benefits to your business. For the sake of brevity, we’ll focus on just a few below.Helps Focus Business ObjectivesAs a business, we all have varying hypotheses about what might be negatively affecting our customers or our desired business outcomes.We’re sure many of you have spent man hours and capital on initiatives that unfortunately just didn’t solve the problem. Identifying the key positive and negative aspects of our business from our customer’s perspective is extremely helpful in focusing resources and efforts to the highest impact issues.Helps Replace Biases With Intellectual HonestyNormalizing the feedback data and providing a score to trends within the data, allows us to stay intellectually honest about what the positives and negatives of our product experience are. It eliminates our urge to respond reactively to a single piece of feedback, even if it comes from the loudest voice in the crowd. NPS puts all of our feedback, from a variety of different users, in context and quickly identifies the trends in that feedback. Quick access to these insights helps us avoid injecting our own biases as our brains inevitably race to try and explain what’s causing an issue. NPS allows us to look at the issue objectively via trends, and identify exactly what factors are contributing to that issue.Helps Us Determine Why We Have A ProblemOur traditional Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), such as conversion rate and drop off rate, do a great job of telling us that we do have a problem. We’re not vying for NPS to replace these, as they are still good methods of notifying the team that something is or is becoming a problem. We look at NPS as another indicator that gives us insight into the overall health of the business. NPS analysis gives us more context on exactly what that problem is, what factors are contributing to it, and what factors are not. This really helps us achieve the two benefits outlined above.Helps Create A Truly Customer Centric Product & ExperienceMany companies like to use the term “customer centric” as a marketing gimmick to establish trust with potential customers they’re attempting to acquire. By building NPS feedback into your product development processes, you’re able to quickly and easily inject customer feedback into future iterations and measure their effect. Over time, you build a strong, loyal customer base because you’ve proven that their feedback really matters and you’ve allowed them to contribute to building better experiences. This type of process should be engrained into blockchain projects, like Sweetbridge, that are largely community supported. We have an obligation to our customers to not only help them leverage the immense benefits of blockchain technology, but also, to enjoy the experience while they do.Interested in helping us build a better blockchain product for the people? Sign up to become a Sweetbridge Product Tester here.We’re Delighted To Build This Together was originally published in Sweetbridge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.