Product teams typically spend 30% of their time on user research activities. It starts with discovering opportunities amongst customers' pain points and desires. These opportunities are prioritized based on the severity of the problem, the number of customers affected, the business impact, and so on. Once the solutions are brainstormed, it is important to validate the biggest assumptions of each, so that the solution can hit the customer and business expectations. Lastly, after launching new features, it is important to evaluate the effectiveness of those changes. This cycle continues and seeks to optimize growth initiatives, launch new features, improve product adoption, and more.
Here’s a breakdown of the type of research companies might conduct at each stage of the product development lifecycle.
Below we are highlighting a few ways in which Blitzllama can be useful in each stage of the product development lifecycle.
Discover Opportunities
1. Investigate dropoffs in critical product funnels
Improving conversions of product funnels is often messy and can take months of effort from multiple teams. To improve conversions, product and design teams rely on intuition to come up with a set of hypotheses, brainstorm solutions, engineering teams build and ship the solutions, and then run A/B tests to validate the efficacy of the solution. If the solution doesn’t improve the conversion (probably because the hypothesis wasn’t correct) to the expected levels, the same cycle repeats.
A better and very low-effort approach to start off with the right set of hypotheses is asking users the right questions at the right time.
Using Blitzllama, product and designs teams can launch surveys to ask a few questions to users immediately after they drop off from the flow. And within hours can get a highly contextual understanding of the ‘whys’ behind user actions.
Implementation tips: You can set the survey to pause on reaching x responses and not survey users who have been surveyed in the last 7 days. You can also add a delay to the survey launch to make the user experience less jarring.
Learn how a gaming app improved its purchase conversion from 8% to 12% or an edtech app improved its D1 retention using Blitzllama.
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2. Learn from your multi-lingual users too
Blitzllama manages the end-to-end flow of learning from your multilingual users. The workflow of translating questions into non-English languages, personalizing language to the user, and auto-detecting and translating the non-English responses to English is completely automated. We currently support 30+ popular languages.
Most user research tools only address parts of the above flow, leaving teams to spend hours to, for example, auto-detect and auto-translate the non-English responses.
Use Blitzllama to keep learning and generating insights from your non-English users ✌️
Prioritize Opportunities
And then ideate potential solutions
Blitzllama provides sophisticated capabilities for feedback observability. First, a quick primer on how Blitzllama processes the feedback data. Blitzllama stores all the feedback data in a single repository. An advanced NLP then groups the textual feedback into topics, marks if it is a positive or negative sentiment, and provides recommended actions. So the algorithm automatically identifies spam content, which makes it easier to focus on actionable feedback data.
Now, jumping to Blitzllama’s observability features.
1. Build dashboards to prioritize customer requests or monitor NPS
Customizable dashboards make it easy to continuously monitor user issues in real-time or to prioritize the top customer issues and requests across cohorts.
“Love the dashboarding capabilities of Blitzllama! This gives insights to prioritize the roadmap that we can’t easily access using other tools” - Product Manager at a SaaS startup.
Here are a few ideas to get started with the feedback dashboards: blog.
2. Segment and analyze the feedback data
UI-based query builder makes it easy for everyone from product managers to user researchers and designers to play around with the data.
“I really love Blitzllama’s Spotlight. It has reduced my workload so much by taking away the need for manual export/manipulation across multiple tools” - Head of Product at a gaming startup.
Test Assumptions
That need to be true for your solution to succeed
1. Test assumptions around new product development
Assume you are a product manager building a creator monetization platform and you are evaluating pay via crypto feature. There could be many assumptions as you work on this feature, eg. one assumption could be “our users want to pay via crypto”. Here Blitzllama’s in-product survey can be tremendously useful. You can quickly ask users “When was the last time you paid for any service via crypto?” and validate the assumption.
Marty Cagan considered the guru of product management, argues in his book “Inspired” that best product teams conduct 15–20 discovery iterations a week. Discovery iterations are testing assumptions, not entire ideas.
“We loosely define an iteration in discovery as trying out at least one new idea or approach…To set your expectations, teams competent in modern discovery techniques can generally test on the order of 10–20 iterations per week.” - Marty Cagan, INSPIRED
2. Reduce no-shows in user research calls
Do your users get spooked out when your teams reach out to them? Do they cut the call immediately after the introduction? Do most users not remember taking that specific action in the app?
These and other reasons might be significantly reducing your efficiency of user research forcing you to call 10x more people and make conclusions on low-quality feedback.
With Blitzllama, you can launch targeted in-product surveys to ask certain users if they would like to participate in a short user research call, share context about the call and book a convenient time on Calendly - making research panel organization super easy.
These hacks enabled a company to improve its research call answer rates from 15% to 80%. A detailed case study coming soon!
3. Frictionlessly follow up with users
Do you want to set up a user research call with users whose NPS was < 5? Or share updates with users who had requested a feature?
With most tools, you may have to manually export/manipulate user records and create new campaigns.
But with Blitzllama, it is super easy to follow up: use response filters to create the intended follow-up user cohort and then launch an in-product survey targeting this cohort. This only takes a few clicks!
A screenshot of creating a follow-up cohort on Blitzllama’s dashboard.
Test Concepts and Usability
To ensure features in development hit customer expectations
1. Test concepts and mockups with users
Whether you are researching a bold bet or deciding among various design options, you can get users' inputs on concepts quickly using Blitzllama's concept tests.
In unmoderated concept tests, you can embed Figma files, and define tasks to complete and questions to answer. Users get to complete these tests on their own time. You get the responses and the screen recording of their work.
Blitzllama’s concept tests are browser-based, mobile-compatible, and require no additional setup. Here is an example https://link.blitzllama.com/L2L2SW3D/prototype?lang=en.
2. Evaluate marketing images
Marketing and growth teams can test out marketing images and videos with users to know how their users perceive each piece of content. This helps teams to triangulate on the right set of content and spend marketing dollars with higher confidence.
Here is an example of a prototype survey to test marketing content - https://link.blitzllama.com/LvNnnXan/prototype?lang=en
2. Check what users think about copies
A user research team at a company building LinkedIn for blue-collared workers discovered that 5x more users were familiar with the term “CV” compared to “resume” while testing multiple messaging copies. This increased from 10% to 45% of the eligible users uploading their resumes on the app.
Are there any similar low-effort but high-impact optimizations in your product?
Using Blitzllama’s Test Messaging Concepts templates, you can run quick tests to know if your users understand well your content
Off-topic: This impressive article Finding Language/Market Fit by First Round provides useful frameworks for improving your content.
Evaluate New Feature Experience
To identify product gaps early
1. Get real-time feedback on new features
When you ship a new highly anticipated feature, the entire team holds their breath to know how the feature is performing and what the users think about it. Quantitative metrics like feature usage or feature retention give a fair idea of the feature’s performance albeit slowly (to adjust for the novelty bias, etc.). But it is almost impossible to know in real-time and accurately what the users think about it!
You can get real-time and continuous feedback on new features in two ways: (a) “give feedback” CTA that opens Blitzllama surveys gives you a continuous feedback stream, (b) launch a Blitzllama survey immediately after a user completes using the new feature.
Amplitude adding a “Give Feedback” CTA on their newly launched Data Tables feature.
Implementation tip: A survey can trigger when a user lands on the last screen of the new feature flow or when a backend trigger like the feature_usage_complete event is triggered.
Measure Experience Continuously
Through periodic NPS/CSAT studies to discover new issues
1. Accurately run NPS and CSAT studies
Tens of tools like Chameleon or MoEngage exist that let you conduct in-product NPS and CSAT scores. Blitzllama does a few things better than most tools.
Ask the right people at the right time using various user attributes and trigger filters. One-click feedback data export to Mixpanel and other tools. Auto-categorises textual feedback. Create dashboards to view NPS scores across surveys or for specific cohorts. Advanced options include periodically asking every 30 days or asking until the user submits an NPS score.
Implementation tip: Blitzllama has pre-created survey templates for popular customer experience measurements like NPS, CSAT, and SUS so that you can get started within a few clicks.
2. Supercharged link surveys
Link surveys like Typeform or Google Forms need no introduction. But in case you want to supercharge your link surveys, check below on how Blizllama’s link surveys let you do more!
Questions can be auto-answered for users. This is helpful if you want to pass user identifiers like user id into responses to analyze better.
Survey progress is auto-saved. So if a user opens a survey in a subsequent session, the user will land on a question where he/she left off in the previous session.
Block duplicate responses. Using resurvey conditions, you can let users answer only once - this is helpful to accurately measure NPS or other critical metrics.
The response data can be exported in real-time to Mixpanel and other tools with a few clicks. Further, auto summarization of the feedback data saves time while analyzing responses.
Implantation tip: Blitzllama has 50+ templates around the most common product use cases, so you can jump right in and launch one.
3. Add Blitzllama surveys in the “give feedback” sections and keep all feedback in a single place
Most mobile and web apps have “give feedback” sections in the left navigation menu or at critical product stages. But the feedback received goes often unnoticed (ref).
With Blitzllama you can easily channel all the feedback into a single repository and make sure no customer request or feedback goes unnoticed.
A quick note on the implementation. Blitzllama’s surveys are triggered on click of these “give feedback” CTAs. The survey questions can be modified anytime on Blitzllama’s dashboard. Blitzllama’s NLP algorithm auto-categorizes responses and filters out spam. All the feedback activity can be seamlessly monitored on Blitzllama (check the Feedback Observability section below for more on this).
Integrate into existing workflows
1. Improve app store ratings
Increasing app store ratings increases the view-to-install conversion (280% on increasing ratings from 2 to 3 stars, ref)and organic downloads due to app store optimization (ASO). Asking users to review on the app store has two key elements: timing and content.
The review asks should be ideally after the happiest moments in your product journey. First, to identify the ideal set of moments, experiment by showing Blitzllama rating surveys at different points in the app. Based on the average rating, you can pick a set of moments. Second, selectively ask users to rate on app stores based on their rating on the rating ask. For example, only ask users who rate >= 4 to review on Playstore. Lastly, the resurvey guardrail will ensure that a user will not get the rating scale more than once every x days.
The review content can tremendously improve ASO. You can influence the keywords that a user adds in a review by asking users after completing specific actions and formulating the right questions. For example, if you want to rate for a “safe and secure crypto wallet, " the rating can be immediately after a successful withdrawal or deposit into the wallet. And asking “How easy and safe was your experience withdrawing money from the wallet?” before redirecting users to the app store will prime the users to add “easy” and “safe” in the reviews.
2. Trigger in-product surveys on backend events
Using backend events, you can launch surveys to users inside your mobile or web apps. Some examples of backend events can be after the completion of an order, when a user is verified, or when a customer support ticket is closed.
The backend trigger events can be sent to Blitzllama easily through an API. Here is the documentation link: backend trigger.
Implementation tip: You can personalize the survey texts using user attributes or with properties of backend triggers. Check more here - documentation.
3. Get real-time updates on Slack
If you’re a bit like us, you must be coordinating most work from Slack! To make sure you don’t miss any actionable insights, you can receive Blitzllama updates on your Slack channels.
You can opt-in to selectively get responses in real-time and daily reports sent to your preferred Slack channel. Further, it takes < 1 min to connect Blitzllama to Slack.
4. Sync data with Mixpanel, Amplitude, Segment, and other tools.
Target the right users seamlessly syncing cohorts from your existing tools to Blitzllama. We have partnered with Mixpanel, Amplitude, Segment, and Clevertap to make importing cohorts a matter of a few clicks. For other tools that we haven’t partnered with yet, you can use Blitzllama’s API to import user attributes and cohort data from these tools.
You can export feedback data to any tool in real time using Blitzllama’s webhooks.
Implementation tip: Check how easy it is to connect Blitzllama to Mixpanel here - documentation.
Parting thoughts: Blitzllama takes < 30 mins to set up.
- Blitzllama can be added to your website using Google Tag Manager and doesn’t need any engineering effort.
- You can create new survey triggers in your product directly from Blitzllama’s dashboard.
