Prepare for customer feedback

User adoption, engagement, and retention are key to successful innovation. Why?

Building an innovative new solution isn't about giving users what they want or think they want. It's about the formulation of a hypothesis that can be tested and improved upon. That testing comes in two forms:

• Quantitative (testing feedback): This feedback measures the actions we hope to see.
• Qualitative (customer feedback): This feedback tells us what those metrics mean in the customer's voice.

Quantitative data is number-based using a quantifiable measurement process. Quantitative feedback gives numeric insights into data, which is useful for gathering a large number of answers from customers quickly. Examples of quantitative feedback would be multiple-choice questions and numerical user engagement data. Qualitative feedback is more in depth to get a wider variety of answers and insights into customer thoughts or opinions. Examples of qualitative feedback would be a customer survey with open-ended questions. Both methods of customer feedback provide valuable insights to improve your company's products and services.

Before you integrate feedback loops, you need to have a shared repository for your solution. A centralized repo will provide a way to record and act on all the feedback coming in about your project. GitHub is the home for open-source software. It's also one of the most commonly used platforms for hosting source code repositories for commercially developed applications. The article on building GitHub repositories can help you get started with your repo.

Each of the following tools in Azure integrates with (or is compatible with) projects hosted in GitHub:

Quantitative feedback for web apps

Application Insights is a monitoring tool that provides near-real-time quantitative feedback on the usage of your application. This feedback can help you test and validate your current hypothesis to shape the next feature or user story in your backlog.

Action

To view quantitative data on your applications:

1. Go to Application Insights.
   • If your application doesn't appear in the list, select add and follow the prompts to start configuring Application Insights.
   • If the desired application is in the list, select it.
2. The overview pane includes some statistics on the application. Select application dashboard to build a custom dashboard for data that's more relevant to your hypothesis.

To view the data about your applications, go to the Azure portal.

Learn more

• Set up Azure Monitor
• Get started with Azure Monitor Application Insights
• Build a telemetry dashboard

Quantitative feedback for APIs

The connected economy is changing the way businesses innovate. Markets and industries are being disrupted faster than ever. Disruption takes many forms and businesses must grapple with the innovator's dilemma: how to set the pace of change without stumbling over ongoing business activity.

Enterprises are using APIs externally to change how they interact with their customers and partners. Internally, they're using APIs to seamlessly connect distinct parts of the business. API economy operates on four building blocks: social, mobile, analytics, and cloud. Applications and services can be linked rapidly and cost-effectively to create an extended value proposition.

Action

To record quantitative data on your APIs:

1. Go to API Management services.
2. Select the desired API from the list.
3. Select diagnostic settings in the monitoring section.

To view quantitative data on your APIs:

1. Go to API Management services.
2. Select the desired API from the list.
3. Select application in the monitoring section.

To open API Management services, go to the Azure portal.

Learn more

• Use Azure Monitor to get feedback on APIs

Qualitative feedback

The backlog (or board) is where feedback is recorded as user stories. It's also where the related work is tracked as actionable tasks. Azure Boards can be directly integrated into GitHub, allowing a seamless experience between feedback-work management and any source code.

Action

Azure Boards and Azure Pipelines require a portal that's separate from GitHub and Azure. Get started using Azure DevOps Services.

Action

To create a DevOps project:

1. Go to Azure DevOps Projects.
2. Select create DevOps project.
3. Select runtime, framework, and service.

Learn more

These articles will help you centralize and manage feedback by using Azure Boards together with GitHub:

• Get started with Azure Boards
• Azure Boards and GitHub

Close the loop with pipelines

Acting on feedback might not always mean adding the feature requested by the customer. But every data point should result in some change. That change might be a change in how you think about things. It might also be an entirely different technical change from the one requested. Either way, deployment pipelines and tools like Azure Pipelines allow you to quickly publish those changes so they can be shared with the customer frequently.

Action

To view current deployments in your pipeline:

1. Go to app services.
2. Select the desired application from the list.
3. Select Deployment Center in the deployment section of the app services pane.

To view your applications in App Service, go to the Azure portal.

Learn more

Start building out your deployment pipelines:

• Create your first pipeline
• GitHub Release tasks