How negative feedback leads to better UX

The feedback you receive—especially negative feedback—can play a vital role in revamping and enhancing your brand and your product’s user experience (UX).

In this article, we’ll share the importance of channeling negative feedback to enhance UX and keep your team’s morale strong.

What is UX feedback?

User experience feedback is information that customers and product users provide to companies about their experience with a product or service. This qualitative and quantitative data offers valuable insights from active users, so you can understand what customers really think of your website or product.

Analyzing and understanding customer feedback helps UX designers, researchers, product management teams, and marketers identify flaws and bug fixes to improve the product, service, and overall user experience. 

2 types of UX feedback: negative and positive

There are two types of feedback: negative feedback—sometimes known as redirecting feedback—and positive feedback—aka reinforcing feedback. 

Reinforcing or positive feedback ensures and approves a specific game plan. With negative or redirecting feedback, businesses can alter their ideas and improve on them instead of taking offense. 

Redirecting feedback must be accepted as constructive criticism and be used to generate a better output or improve your product. 

Why negative feedback is important to enhance UX

Identifying challenges through feedback during early product discovery and research stages can work wonders: it highlights the need to have a strong, close-knit team with confidence and trust in each other and your product. If criticism is taken constructively and positively, you can turn it into a wonderful learning experience.

When you receive feedback that highlights pain points or improvements needed on a project, improving the overall design process becomes much more manageable. Over time, you can leverage negative UX feedback to identify and solve many product management challenges. 

When team members are on the same page on how to execute a plan, you can clarify expectations. For a team that suggests better ideas through negative feedback, feedback becomes a source of inspiration. 

Sometimes, it might be a case of having one member who has more experience with a particular group of customers, so they can suggest great ideas for an interactive and creative UX for that customer segment. Understanding the different psychographics and personas within your target audience will help you cater to their needs, and deliver a better user experience.

When each product is targeted at particular groups of customers, each member pitches in to share their ideas and insight. When each member can help out with the challenges and expectations of their users, it helps your teams achieve better product positioning. Such attention to detail can enhance UX unlike anything. 

What makes negative feedback crucial for a successful business?

Statistics show that about 88% of users do not return to a product or website after a single bad experience. And about 40% of these wouldn't even wait for a website to load beyond 4 seconds. Successful businesses know the value of listening to users and improving your website optimization to elevate the product experience.

Companies need to pay attention to negative UX feedback and make amendments to the speed, navigation, and functionality of their product or website in ways that improve the user experience.

Any negative feedback about a brand or product spreads quickly to the public. We live in the age of social proof, where reviews and user testimonials have the power to influence people, grow brands, and drive online sales.

Innovative businesses make the best of bad media and make changes to their product to create customer delight, promote a positive image, and show that they are flexible with change. 

The way a business behaves in the face of criticism and how they take negative feedback makes all the difference. If a company makes a constructive plan to get back into the good books of the general public and build trust with customers, they can turn events in their favor and earn a higher net promoter score that instills loyalty from more users. 

How do brands enhance their UX through negative feedback

Once brands have collected negative feedback, they must prioritize areas that need special attention and divide the tasks amongst the team. 

UX complaints and internal suggestions from the team can help make a difference and must not be taken lightly: businesses that don't pay heed to how the public reacts to their brand are not taken seriously in the long run, leading to the loss of investor buy-in and a drop in conversion rates.

Technical debt is another area of opportunity for product designers and website owners. Bugs and technical problems on a brand’s website should be addressed immediately: it is essential to have a quick glitch-free web page, and every brand with an online presence must have a fast-loading page. Any small technical problem can deter customers and prospective clients. When you improve the UX, customer satisfaction increases, and so does your brand’s reputation.

Hotjar’s Incoming Feedback tool helps online businesses understand the user experience in real-time and find quick solutions to product problems like bugs frustrating customers who are trying to navigate their website. Using a feedback widget like the one below, you can get your customer’s take and validate business and product ideas based on qualitative user insights.

Having a business is not just about creating a logo and leaving things on autopilot. In an ever-evolving market with emerging competitors and changing consumer expectations, your UX is not a set-and-forget task.

There must be constant improvement. A business must always focus on fixing bugs and issues identified by customers, improving your product, and being on the lookout for technical problems to give their users the best possible experience.

Turn negative feedback into an opportunity for business growth 

Negative feedback is inevitable. How you respond to it will determine whether bad reviews are an asset or a problem for your business. The way you accept and respond to negative feedback will determine the success of your product, and the strength of your brand reputation.

With a customer-centric culture and proactive attitude to conversion rate optimization, your team can turn negative UX feedback into a great opportunity for your users and your business.

This article was written by Saskia Ketz from Mojomox, an online logo maker that allows you to create high-quality, personalized wordmarks and color palettes for your brand.