Unveiling the Life Cycle of User Feedback: Best Practices from Software Practitioners

TL;DR

This paper explores how organizations manage user feedback throughout its life cycle, highlighting best practices and activities that improve understanding of user perceptions to enhance software products.

Contribution

It introduces a structured life cycle of user feedback management based on interviews with practitioners, emphasizing diverse sources like social media and actionable best practices.

Findings

Organizations use multiple feedback sources, especially social media.

Active curation and tailored activities depend on feedback source.

Practices lead to better understanding of user perception and reduced attrition.

Abstract

User feedback has grown in importance for organizations to improve software products. Prior studies focused primarily on feedback collection and reported a high-level overview of the processes, often overlooking how practitioners reason about, and act upon this feedback through a structured set of activities. In this work, we conducted an exploratory interview study with 40 practitioners from 32 organizations of various sizes and in several domains such as e-commerce, analytics, and gaming. Our findings indicate that organizations leverage many different user feedback sources. Social media emerged as a key category of feedback that is increasingly critical for many organizations. We found that organizations actively engage in a number of non-trivial activities to curate and act on user feedback, depending on its source. We synthesize these activities into a life cycle of managing user feedback. We also report on the best practices for managing user feedback that we distilled from responses of practitioners who felt that their organization effectively understood and addressed their users' feedback. We present actionable empirical results that organizations can leverage to increase their understanding of user perception and behavior for better products thus reducing user attrition.