Dogfooding. Drinking your own champagne.
You can use either of the terms, depending on your taste, but both mean the same thing. It’s when a company uses their own products to test or promote the product.
Well, here at EmailMeForm, we’re fond of doing that. But we use our own forms not just for show. In fact, we love using our own forms! They make our everyday work easier.
Here’s the story of what role our tool had when we rebuilt our very own Form Manager Dashboard.
The Call for Change
We’re not new when it comes to the form building game. We’re already 10 years in the business. And our interface needed a touchup that time.
In tandem for the need for the change, our team has noticed recurring form feature requests from our clients. As a feedback form builder ourselves, we decided to play genie and grant our users’ reasonable requests.
That move hits two of our yearly goals — improve our interface and delight our users — and we want to nail it.
We Want to Do It Right
Let me start with this picture.
Nothing complex, it’s just an elevator button that you press so you can go up or down. To go up, you push the right button. Oh, wait. What? That takes you down? Ugh, okay. So, I think I have to press the second button?
This is supposed to be a simple one, but the design made everything complicated! The line between the two buttons is merely visible. Can you even see it?
Since we’re about to modify the design of our tool, we want to ensure that it doesn’t annoy or confuse our existing users and it’s easy enough to onboard our new users. Not like the elevator button above.
Good design is good business.
— Thomas Watson Jr.
To do everything right, we first need to start with how our users feel about our current dashboard.
We’ve tapped our active users to help us figure out exactly what sucks and what doesn’t. We created this software satisfaction survey via our own feedback form creator. It’s a quick 8-page survey, which is a combination of text and visuals to illustrate the questions.
After studying the data, our Design Team worked on a mockup that was the foundation of our new design.
So Did We Do It Right?
Are you ready to see the outcome? Here it is.
Initial user feedback made us believe that we have indeed done it right. They have shared encouraging words when they first saw our video update.
Here are some of our favorite comments:
“Thank you for all your hard work… I like the feeling that you are ALWAYS trying to improve your service. Good job, congratulations!” - A. Santiago
“I love the organization of folders - no more long list to go through - love it and get it to us as fast as you can!” - Diane Somers
“The new form manager looks awesome. Can’t wait.” - One of your users
“Like the new look and love the new folder features. Can’t wait to use the new design. Thanks for all your work.” - D. Lage
As a token of appreciation, we gave our respondents first and exclusive access to our alpha prototype. Danilo, our Chief Creative Officer made this video presentation exclusively for them.
Their responses have overwhelmed us. It rewarded our team’s hard work and further built up our excitement in serving them more.
If you need help in creating your own feedback form, we have free feedback form templates that you can download for free. You can embed them in your website, no need for a Wordpress feedback form plugin. Hope these will help you get started!
Beyond the users’ appreciation
Good feedback is always heartening, but at EmailMeForm,
we always measure our success through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
For this project, we assessed our new UI’s effectivity through traffic and clicks on our dashboard.
We were able to increase traffic on our important app pages like the Upgrade pages and Templates page. According to Google Analytics, the new design has driven a 41% increase in traffic to our Upgrade Pages, while our Templates Pages have received a 21.85% increase. As for the clicks received, there were 76% more clicks to our Upgrade Pages and 51% more clicks to our Templates Page.
On this project, we listened to our clients and used our own product in the process.
When we did this, we had a beautiful product outcome.
Saas companies ought to do both. Listening to your customers’ sentiments lead you to success. And your team having the first-hand user experience of your own product gives them the confidence to market and support your product to your clientele.
If your company is still not doing it, you’re missing out. Start with feedback forms and take it from there. Just eat the dog food already! Right, buddy?
Aiza Coronado
Aiza is a Content Developer and Marketer at EmailMeForm. She easily gets upset when random dogs don't bark back at her hello's.
