We continue the series of articles “Calendar of the tester” , where each month the circuit testers share their experiences and working secrets. In a previous article, Maxim Zakharov talked about how to parse backlog.

This time, Ilaria Tarasova and Maxim Kolodkin from Kontur.Elba will tell you why the tester needs to communicate with the client and what tools are there in Kontur. In order not to miss the new article, subscribe to the telegram channel .

In our team, the developers themselves write tests well and quickly. Therefore, we do not spend time on automation, but fight for the quality of the product in everything that relates to interaction with users.

Now we have several communication channels. For example, technical support communicates by phone, answers messages in the mail, Telegram and online chat in the service. All collected problems are analyzed by our expert and transmitted to the team in the form of ready statistics.

Over 8 years, the number of users has grown significantly, so the number of consultants has increased. Now there are 70 of them, they work according to strict rules and regulations for the sake of efficiency. On the one hand, this helps to build the work of a large team, and on the other, it makes the process very inflexible. A consultant can solve a specific problem, but he does not have enough time to think broader and find its true cause (for example, in the interface). As a result, such problems do not emerge in the monthly statistics, but remain at the bottom until a critical mass of dissatisfied users has accumulated.

In addition to technical support, we have Likes and UserEcho. Now both channels are supported. We used to do this, but now we rarely respond, rather using them in read only mode, and as testers we get a lot of goodies from this. We will tell you about them, and you will see that close contact with the user improves the quality of the product (if you know what I mean).

Huskies

This channel was invented by designers as a tool for assessing the emotional component of a page, that is, a personal feeling of comfort-convenience or annoyance-misunderstanding. It looks like a small “ear” with the ability to like or dislike, and also write in more detail what exactly you liked or didn't like.

"Eye" with likes in the upper right corner of the page.

A click opens a form for a detailed comment.

All calls from Likes come to a separate e-mail box with information on which page of Elba the user left the like. In most cases, the page context helps you understand the problem right away.

Over time, users began to use this channel as normal technical support, so we put Likes at their disposal. But we are still looking at what they wrote to us on a separate page.

There is a big plus from quick and affordable feedback - it's mobility. Imagine that we have unveiled a new feature and it is not entirely clear to the user. Appeals about this begin to come to Likes, we monitor them and ask clarifying questions to users, if necessary. We find out what is the reason, and work begins with the team. At this point, the tester is already difficult to call out a set of scripts, and begins to interact with the team to relieve the pain of a large number of users.

If technical support were engaged in this, then the feedback process was possible only if there was an individual person accumulating the appeal, and this would drag out the work.  

Huskies are a way to see the “average temperature in a hospital” at the moment: to understand where only the symptoms are and where it’s time to call a doctor.

Well, and a couple of side pluses in addition:

• When you get a grasp of people's appeals, you get in their place and eventually accumulate even more test scenarios. Sometimes you are surprised: it turns out that this is how they use features! And at the next run, you recall those people, and trying to think like them, you check even more test cases. It also helps in our discussions in narrow circles, which Sasha Akhmetov spoke about .
• Solving the user's problem, you begin to better understand how different parts of the system work. So, if you want your trainee to begin to better understand the service, let him rake a little bit of calls :)

UserEcho

Another communication channel is UserEcho .

For us, this is a bank of problems and long-standing Wishlist. This service, as a social network of Elba users, allows you to create a topic for everyone and vote for other people's topics. Thus, we have a quantitative assessment of the wishes of our clients: it is problematic to win votes there, so you can trust the data. When the task goes into development, the topic status changes from “Under review” to “In progress”. After graduation, he goes to “Completed” with an explanation of what we implemented with screenshots from the service.

If there is a specific number of people who need a feature, then you are more likely to convince everyone to do it. Or at least ask the usability scientist to conduct a study on this topic and confirm or refute the hypothesis.

Yes, by the way, you don’t even need to look for respondents for such testing, they all unsubscribed in the comments to the created topic. The only problem is that these topics are getting old, and over the years there is a feeling that we are not doing anything. A typical comment on such long-lived topics: “The theme has been over for 5 years, but you still haven’t! It’s a couple of minutes of work, I know, because the programmer himself. ” And with this, something needs to be done so that there is no negative for old users and demotivation for new ones.

What did we decide to do with this?

After 7 years of running this channel, they wrote an honest text:

Here, the Elba team collects suggestions for improving the service. To decide which task to take in the first place, the developers take into account changes in legislation, the complexity of the task and its usefulness. Sometimes wishes on UserEcho help us:

- If your idea gets 100 votes, the developers will discuss it and describe the solution in the subject.

“If your idea gets less than 50 votes per year, we will close the discussion.”

Cons of the process

So that you do not have the false impression that close communication with the user has only positive aspects, we will list a couple of minuses:

Blurring eyes at first. You talk with a specific user → you solve a user’s problem → you think that everyone has such a problem. Over time, this minus disappears, because you begin to better distinguish between general and particular problems.

The variety of channels of appeals does not allow to calculate in one place all appeals on the same problems. Technical support copes with this well, the guys make calls to a single database. But Likes and UserEcho stand aside. We want to have a convenient tool that does not require a lot of time to read all the voices in one place. If you have already solved this problem for yourself or found a convenient tool, write to us about it.  

We have been working in Elba for 5 years and we have been talking with those who use our service almost all this time. After that, you perceive writers more personally. Do you understand who you are helping. This is not a spherical horse in a vacuum, but the guy who pushes you to the topic. He also wrote a thank you post on New Year’s, which you reposted as a team chat room, and everyone was wondering and maybe even started working with great enthusiasm.

In the end, you know that for the sake of helping hundreds, or even thousands of such good people, you go to work every day and do better not only your product, but the world as a whole :)

List of calendar articles:
Try a different approach
Reasonable pair testing Testing
: how it happens
Optimize tests
Read a book
Testing analytics A
tester should catch a bug, read Caner and organize traffic
Load a service
Metrics in the service of QA
Test security
Find your client
Sort backlog