What is user feedback?
User feedback is any opinion, report or request about a product that comes from the people who use it. Some of it you asked for, and most of it showed up on its own.
One comment on its own tells you very little. Group fifty of them by topic and you start to see which problem is costing you users and which one is just loud.
What are the types of user feedback?
There are five common types. Each one answers a different question about your product.
- Bug reports describe something in the product that doesn't work as intended.
- Feature requests point at something missing. They usually arrive as a proposed solution, so the real problem sits one layer down.
- Usability feedback shows where people get stuck even though the feature works.
- Satisfaction scores measure how people feel, usually with NPS, CSAT or CES.
- Behavioural signals are never written down: flows people abandon, steps they repeat, screens nobody opens. Analytics shows you where it happens. The comments tell you why.
What is the difference between solicited and unsolicited feedback?
Solicited feedback is what you asked for, and unsolicited feedback is what people send without being asked.
Solicited feedback comes from surveys, interviews, usability tests and in-app questions. You pick the question, which means you also pick the bias. Mostly you hear about things you already suspected.
The unsolicited kind arrives through support tickets, bug reports, review sites, sales calls and emails. It's messier to organise. It's also where the surprises are, because nobody prompted it.
Surveys alone mostly play your own assumptions back to you, and a ticket queue over-represents the people who had a bad day, so you need both sources.
What is the difference between user feedback and customer feedback?
A user is anyone who uses the product. A customer is whoever pays for it. In B2B software these are often different people. The buyer cares about reporting and cost, the daily user cares about the task in front of them, and when their feedback disagrees you need to know which group said what.
What is an example of user feedback?
A good example names the task, what went wrong and under which conditions. Take a comment about your own product such as: "I tried to export the quarterly report three times and it failed each time on a date range longer than six months." Someone else can reproduce that, which makes it usable. "Exporting is broken" covers the same topic, and nobody can act on it.
What makes user feedback useful?
Useful feedback has three things: context, reproducibility and frequency.
- Context: what the person was doing, on which page and on which device.
- Reproducibility: enough detail that someone else can see the same thing.
- Frequency: is this one person or forty?
Frequency changes decisions. Without a count, one well-written email can outweigh a pattern of forty quieter reports in a roadmap meeting.
How do you act on user feedback?
Acting on user feedback takes four steps: collect it in one place, group it, find the problem behind each request, and tell people what happened.
- Collect it in one place. Feedback spread across support, sales calls and Slack can't be counted.
- Group before you judge. The same problem gets described a dozen different ways.
- Separate the request from the problem. People send you their proposed fix. The friction underneath is what you want to solve.
- Close the loop. Tell people what changed, including when the answer is no. People who never hear back stop sending feedback.
User feedback for enterprise product teams
At enterprise scale, the hard part is proving what the feedback says. Ten product managers each read a slice of tickets, calls and survey comments, and each slice tells a slightly different story.
A theme holds up in a roadmap review when you can trace it back to the individual comments behind it, with a count and a source for each, and the discussion becomes a walkthrough of evidence.
How Usersnap brings user feedback together
Usersnap puts solicited and unsolicited feedback into one workspace, with each item tied to where it came from.
- Collection: in-app widgets, micro-surveys and annotated screenshots, with browser, operating system and screen size details attached.
- Calls and conversations: Channels imports Zoom Cloud call transcripts and closed Intercom conversations into the same place as everything else.
- Grouping: Sentiment Sensor tags topic and sentiment as items arrive, and the Opportunities Board is where a theme becomes a scored decision.
- Asking questions in your AI assistant: the MCP connector lets ChatGPT, Claude or Cursor query your live workspace with your own permissions, for example "what are the top five topics in feedback this month?"
Sentiment Sensor is included on Professional plans and above, and available as an add-on on Starter and Growth. Channels is included from the Growth plan.
User feedback FAQ
What is the purpose of user feedback?
User feedback shows you what people actually experience in your product, so you can fix what blocks them and build what they need instead of what you assume they need.
How do you collect user feedback?
Use in-app widgets, surveys and interviews for solicited feedback, and pull in support tickets, call recordings and bug reports for unsolicited feedback. Collecting only one kind gives you a biased picture.
What is a user feedback report?
A user feedback report summarises feedback for a period: the main themes, how often each came up, example comments and what the team decided to do about them.
Is user feedback qualitative or quantitative?
Both. Comments and call notes are qualitative. Scores such as NPS and CSAT, and counts of how often a theme appears, are quantitative. Good analysis uses the counts to decide what matters and the comments to understand why.
Related terms
See how product teams trace a decision back to the feedback behind it.
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