Measuring performance with real users is a vital part of the service design process.
Since its creation, the Apply to become an academy service has captured user feedback using a third party service called 'Qualtrics'.
Qualtrics provides our users with an opportunity to leave feedback by completing a survey form, accessed through an always-visible link in our phase banner.
Although the service's current setup does allow a user to give us feedback, there are few issues with our current approach.
- The survey isn't maintained by us and cannot be easily edited or updated.
- Whoever maintains the survey adds an extra step between our team and the team that receives the feedback.
- Users are unlikely to break away from the their current task in order to tell us what they think of the service unless they have no other choice.
- There's an option to give feedback at the end of the application too, meaning it appears twice on that page.
Owning the survey
The first thing we did was build our own version of the survey. This would sit on our servers and could be maintained by us, removing a potential point of failure.
In addition, our new survey would have the same look and feel as the rest of the service.
Providing other options
Because we believe the main reason a user would break from their journey is to get help, we chose the Service Manual approach to the phase banner. This lets the user get help in the first instance, but also allows the user to feedback at that point if they really want to.
We chose not to remove the link to survey from the end of the journey, as after speaking to user researchers, this does seem to the be time when users are most open to giving feedback.
We intend to monitor user engagement and iterate as needed.