Customer feedback to improve product design
Access 2007 in many ways is a different product for end users. In previous releases it was very difficult to be successful creating a new application without using help, taking a class, reading a book, or asking the community—information workers that wanted to use the product had to really dive into the product. Sure we had some templates but there weren’t discoverable and the team hadn’t made big investments in that area. Internally, we referred the Access 2003 boot screen as the gray screen of death.
The new Getting Started screen is introducing the product to a much broader range of information workers that don’t have previous experience in Access.
We watched carefully the comments and ratings through Office Online. Everything indicated that people were getting lots of benefit and the template hit the mark and were successful at bring a new class of users. However, the team felt we needed to understand with more clarity how successful the templates were as well as gather more information about our users. We have fairly good communication channels with enterprises through our sales force and professional developers through the MVPs and the blog. The user we didn’t feel was accurately represented in our feedback loop was new users and information workers who were primarily focused on their day job where Access is a tool for helping them make decisions and track stuff.
About 8 months ago we updated our templates to include a Provide Feedback option to the main application form.
This link takes people to a short 10 question survey that utilizes the Ultimate Question methodology to determine customer loyalty and gathers some additional information about our users. The results of the research indicated there were lots of room to improve the template experience for new users.
One of the questions ask people if they would talk to a person on the team about their experience. Since the release of the survey the team has called all types of users to talk about Access on a regular basis. We typically write up our results and share them with the entire team. This process has enabled us to incorporate feedback from many of our users that previously haven’t had a voice in product design decisions.
The team has been able to leverage this information in a number of ways. Early calls indicated many people were having trouble printing labels because the Address field didn’t show up. Turns out the label wizard filters our memo fields and the address field type was a memo (consistency with SharePoint). We were able to quickly release a update to all the templates with a fix. The great thing about the Office Online integration for templates is we can release a fix without having waiting for an SP.
We recently took it one step further. Josh Meisels, our summer intern, used the information to contact a number of people who were using the contacts template. Through the summer we were able to make a number of changes that have been extremely well received. Josh will tell you more about that tomorrow.
Overall, the template survey enabled us to make a connection with an important customer that wasn’t represented in our feedback chain.
