The building or improving your website can take a lot of time and effort, especially when you factor in user feedback. The process involves a lot of email exchanges, page revisions, and meetings between designers and developers and various other teams within the company. At least that’s how we used to do it. Fortunately, there are different types of visual online survey tools today that allow web design and development services to create and optimize their websites.
For those of you unfamiliar with the term visual online survey, let’s start with the definition. The visual online survey is a method that allows a website visitor to identify and share particular elements of a web page that require some improvement. However, the strategy used to collect and analyze this feedback varies depending on the user’s objective. It will help you determine if you need the technology or whether you can live without it and achieve your goals in another way.
In this blog, we’ll look at how to use visual online surveys for website design by addressing common issues that businesses face online.
The value of the visual online survey
Some web development teams are still struggling to grasp the value of a visual feedback tool. The idea that visitors to the site will provide you with feedback on their navigation without a dedicated tool being set up is false. It would probably look like this: the visitor should first take a screenshot of the page, open it in Paint, tag it, save the tagged image to their desktop, and email it to your business with an explanation of what he sees. We all know that won’t happen…
Using the right visual survey tool, your digital team can facilitate the entire process for your online visitors and you and your team. Whether it’s collecting those comments using review forms and screenshot tools, analyzing them in dashboards, sharing them with colleagues, or taking action. Action, you will save a lot of time and avoid a lot of confusion. This type of tool’s mere presence is also an incentive for your clients and members of your team. This prompts them to leave a comment as soon as they notice a problem.
Let’s see if you can relate to these common issues:
Question 1: No central location for notes and annotations on the website
Excel files here, emails there, and a menacing pile of post-it notes in the corner. This chaotic scenario is probably familiar to many web designers. So how do you keep track of all of this? Many times and I mean many, someone who contributes to the website emails the person responsible for the software, expecting that the email helps them see the problems more quickly. Complicated. Additionally, this process can be time-consuming and stunt website and launch improvements in the pre-launch phase.
Visual investigation tools allow you to spot and immediately annotate website issues using sticky notes, highlighter features, and screenshots. Several of these tools also allow you to compile and analyze your comments in a project dashboard. These intuitive dashboards allow your entire team to view data and allow users to easily filter particular comment items and create reports using this software.
Question 2: Difficulty delegating tasks and communicating with team members
Another problem common to web developers is the lack of proper communication between team members throughout the process. If you don’t have a tool in place, it’s like your communications are via email or spreadsheet notes, which means when you need to locate a particular item, you have to do a real job. Detective to retrieve information – for example, search through email threads or other shared documents.
Thanks to a visual survey tool, the communication process is simplified. You can use easy-to-use search queries to locate specific bug reports or other feedback items and prioritize and assign tasks to your team members. When things are changed, the user will adjust its status to show both they’re working it and how often other team members should be updated.
Question 3: Delayed responses due to a lack of real-time user feedback
As we mentioned earlier, a more traditional way to collect this visual feedback would be to compile all of the ratings and comments and send them to a team member simultaneously. But by gathering this data and processing it later, you are already falling behind in your project.
Real-time data collection has recently become an important part of most of today’s digital tools. This is particularly true in terms of communication between team members and customer support. Real-time responses enable instant interactions and can improve and speed up your workflows. For example, let’s say you want to add a comment asking a team member to update a particular image on your website’s home page. With a visual survey tool like Page Proofer, you can mark the page with a note and send it directly to the team member responsible for handling that request.
Question 4: Identify and determine the origin of a bug
We’ve all been there. You have a list of bug reports in front of you waiting to be fixed. But what do you do when it turns out that recreating the bug yourself is even more difficult than fixing it? Of course, you can play around with it a bit and eventually find a solution, but it’s not always efficient to operate based on guesswork. This is why it is important to have more details behind this user comment, allowing you to more easily solve this bug.
Through the visual survey, users can take screenshots or highlight the bug’s location and simultaneously capture metadata such as browser type, operating system, window size, size screen, etc. In other words, where the bug came from – so you can fix it. But sometimes even that is not enough.
The options are endless with visual feedback
I hope this post has highlighted the importance of visual user feedback in web design. As you can see, for web designers, there are several ways to speed up and simplify the design process, and there are also various tools to choose from. But did you realize that it can be used for other online processes as well?
There are visual online survey tools that allow users to work with visual user feedback to provide deep insight into the online customer experience, especially as the number of visitors and the complexity of a website increase. Using the tool and the various options available to collect and analyze this type of feedback, users can quickly report different issues on a site’s pages in real-time, whether it’s unclear content. , bugs or browser issues.