Insights on Improving Product Quality for Better Customer Experience

When attempting to define product quality, we’ll likely come across multiple perspectives from different disciplines such as engineering, DevOps, product, and user experience (UX).

On the engineering and DevOps side, quality is often quantified across metrics such as uptime, recovery time, scalability, partner performance and more. When it comes to a product, quality may be viewed through the lenses of feature set and market fit, competitiveness, user experience across devices, personalization and accuracy of related delivery and compliance. 

UX professionals want to understand how well they’ve identified the core problem and delivered a solution that solves that problem better than anyone else on the market. There are other considerations such as responsiveness, accessibility, equitable availability, visual design, and design systems. 

So, which discipline has it right? 

It’s a bit of a trick question. While all of these aspects are relevant to the individual disciplines, the definition of quality is rooted in the target users. Ultimately the meaning of quality is straightforward, no matter which discipline you’re coming from: “Quality is the very essence of why you’re building the product in the first place: to solve actual human needs,” explains Kathryn Rosaaen, Manager of Product Management at 3Pillar. “What is the user’s core problem? Are we solving it better than anyone else?”

And here’s an important caveat- it’s the user’s perception of how well the product is serving them that really matters. After all, there’s a virtual graveyard of innovative technology that fell by the wayside once its initial shine faded and users realized it didn’t solve any of their problems. 

To set your product apart from the rest, ensure you’re solving problems, not just nuisances. “Solving a problem for a customer will give you a much better positive perception of solving that single problem than solving 10 nuisances,” explains Don Hiles, UX Solutions Consultant at 3Pillar.

The challenging part here is uncovering those problems. Users are quick to share what they perceive as nuisances; you’ve likely got a list of them in your customer support call logs or from customer interviews. But they may have acclimated to unsolved needs over time and aren’t talking about them. That’s where techniques in UX research that are used to dig in deeper to these problems matter most. 

Understanding and centering around product quality often involves a perspective shift. Instead of approaching the matter as a long list of things to do to build a quality product, focus on the following:

• Who are the users?
• What is their critical need?
• How well do they perceive that the product is solving their problem?

With a cross-functional team, start with the user at the center of the product universe. Include every relevant discipline to contribute information about what you need for baseline quality and employ a thoughtful approach to where you’re going to double down on your efforts. Discuss what will help customers accomplish their goals in a way that gets the technology out of the way as much as possible. This perspective will get you much closer to delivering a quality product for your specific user at your specific stage in your specific industry. 

The foundation of any best practice for increasing product quality to drive CX is a team of heavily experienced product, UX, and engineering professionals. These expert leaders are critical for making sense of the data and insights you’ll receive from feedback baked into loops in your product. Their expertise is required for determining which feedback is relevant for right now or better to consider at a later date. Consider also the power of experts being comfortable talking to each other as a team focused on customers being successful- not adversaries focused on craft metrics. 

Next, ensure your processes are in tune with your audience vision and you have a clear definition of your target CX. Continuous listening practices and a continual stream of research will allow you to drive greater quality into the product. Make sure you’re regularly researching your customer and measuring how they are perceiving their experiences before and after any changes made to the product.To make this practice real, include a box in your roadmap that details how you’ll respond to insights from research.

As for strategies to collect customer feedback, it’s about uniting people and technology. Don recommends implementing a multi-pronged strategy for taking in this feedback from your audience that includes at a minimum:

• Analytics packages baked directed into your product prong 
• The regular cadence of soliciting wide/general general feedback prong
• The user researcher on the UX team soliciting targeted feedback on-demand prong A feedback loop plugged into the product development process

Once you have this data, you can leverage machine learning analysis to serve as a junior researcher to build clustered data. From there, this information should be filtered and guided by a human hand to understand the themes and trends in the data. This is part of the difference between being merely data-driven and becoming data-informed: the layering of a human component of what the data means. Numbers alone won’t give you the information you need. Instead, you must, as Kathryn puts it, “Dig for the unspoken and unseen.”

The role of consistency in the execution of these strategies can’t be overstated. The more consistent you can be from the beginning, the better you’ll understand how the process works and it’ll become more straightforward to implement with each iteration. Furthermore, perform UX research and include data analytics through the entire product development lifecycle- not just a one-time approach when you need an answer to a question. 

Finally, optimize for velocity over quality. While this take might sound backwards at first, there’s a reason it works. When you optimize for velocity, you can afford to make changes in the future based on what you learn from research, feedback, and data without feeling like you have to get everything perfect today The secret here is to establish and use a continual cycle of research to gain the understanding of what actually needs to be changed. The result? Quality.  

How does your organization determine which products are worth developing? Product ideas often get pushed forward based on stakeholder priorities or the latest industry trends. What if you could build confidence in your original product hypothesis by testing and learning before going all in? With 3Pillar’s 6-week proven product validation process you can do just that and find out if the product is worth developing before you invest.