Leveraging Poll Responses for Targeted Research

Striving to understand our users is at the core of the product and design team at Pendo. Throughout a project, we’re constantly checking our design against our target persona and what we’ve learned from these users.

Like all other teams, we reach out to our customers for direct feedback on their experience and satisfaction. And while nothing will ever replace the need to do that, we’re a small design team. We need a way to quickly check against the persona and help us identify which users to connect with.

So we dive into Pendo.

We take advantage of our guides and polling functionality to help us define segments of users. The guide is a simple banner, first created by our VP of Product, with a multiple choice question reading: What is your role?

We present this guide to every new user in Pendo.

We actually have a lot of different customer roles using our product — however our main focus is on the product team and Product Managers. It’s important for us on the design team to make sure we are studying the behavior of both our target persona and any of our secondary personas. With Pendo, we can easily keep track of how different features are performing and collect qualitative feedback. Using the responses from the ‘What is your Role?’ poll, we’ve built segments for Role = Product Manager, Role = UX, etc. We then use those segments throughout the app in a variety of ways:

Pendoのアナリティクス

When I begin research on a project, I create a visitor report with any related Features, per role, to gauge usage. What is currently being used the most or least in relation to my project? What are the current user paths — and how much time is it taking per step? These visitor reports provide a great overview to start further investigation.

With my current project (Guide Designer Redesign), I created a custom Trends graph with our main user roles on the x-axis. I then added this to my “Guides Redesign” dashboard. From here, I gain a good sense of current usage, and am able to keep an eye on the usage over the course of the project. I specifically watch to see if our target role is retaining their high usage. I can also watch for any spikes and dive into the specific users to check our their activity further if needed. Comparing across the different types of users is really important for my team. It impacts how we make design decisions and how we structure talking to customers.

Trends graph built and added to my custom Dashboard.

We then take this a step further and use the poll results and segments to collect qualitative feedback:

Customer Outreach and Feedback

NPS Results

One of my favorite ways to review qualitative feedback is through our NPS Analytics. I’m able to filter the page by a particular segment and dive into the scatter plot to see score and text responses. Currently, I’m actively watching for feedback on the Guides portion of our product, for example: What are detractors saying about their current experience today?

In-App Targeted Messaging

From the visitor reports, or other charts I make, I can identify a list of users to reach out to for further discussion. Because I cannot feasibly connect with all our users in person, I create targeted guides to collect feedback as well. At the beginning of my current project, I sent a survey to a sample group of users based on Poll Response equal to Product Manager and Page Guide Designer used at least 10 times. I was interested in active Guide users and understanding what this core group thought of the current experience. At the end of my walkthrough, I finished with asking if they would be interested in usability testing in the future.

Survey launched in-app to targeted group.

These are just a few ways I use the poll results feature in my day to day job at Pendo. Special thanks to Shannon Bauman, VP of Product, for first building out the guide and Adam Lohner, Partner Engineer, for defining the role segments.

While we use other methods to define personas, such as the jobs to be done framework, this is a really great place to start collecting this feedback in-app. Our entire team (Product and even other teams in the organization) can use this data to investigate and create their own reports at any time. 🎉