survey

It’s been two weeks since our launch (already? time flies!), and we decided it was important to get some user feedback.  So we randomly surveyed 1000 users, and received just over 600 responses.  That response rate alone was amazing.  Even more amazing?  How much our users seem to like our service.  Here’s the results (images courtesy of Google forms):

1. Are You Still Using NudgeMail?

Wow. Just about 90% of respondents say they are still using it.  Granted those who aren’t using it probably ignored our survey for the most part, but still, it’s an encouraging answer!

2. How often do you send NudgeMails?

The first option was “less often than once per week”, second was “once per day”.  Which means about 1/3 of our users are 1-10/day or more, and 2/3 should be considered infrequent users.  Seems about right, as it can take a while for people to figure out how to apply NudgeMail for their own personal workflow – more on that below.

3. What do you use NudgeMail for? (check all that apply)

The missing word (thanks Google, but since your service is free I shouldn’t really complain) for the first two was “reminders”, the last one was “inbox empty”.  This is an important question, as the thing we’ve clearly learned already is how distinct individual users’ email and workflow patterns are.  What works amazing for one person is someone else’s worst nightmare, etc etc.  Interesting for us to note was how little people are using it for “Inbox Zero” efforts (for now).

4. How helpful do you think our website, www.NudgeMail.com, has been in getting you going on NudgeMail?

This is an area we know we have to work on, and the answer is again fairly biased by the respondents – those who are using and loving the service are clearly more likely to have found the website useful.  As we look to improve we’re highly focused on making sure it’s just drop-dead simple for anyone to try out NudgeMail and see if it does fit into their own flow.

5. How easy has it been for you to set reminders using NudgeMail?

This corresponds really well with our error logs, as people have adopted the system, they do seem to “get it”.  Which raises the question of whether or not it’s self-defeating for those who had trouble with their first experiences.  We’ll be paying a lot of attention to this too.

6. How easy or difficult has it been for you to see and change your NudgeMail settings?

Probably the most complicated part of NudgeMail so far is getting users to understand that they can change settings.  The downside to an all-email-based system is that we are limited to all commands happening via email.  We love the elegance, but yet it still reinforces the upside to enabling some form of console/control panel via the NudgeMail.com website.  Added to the to-do list (aka I sent myself a NudgeMail on it).

7. Overall NudgeMail experience so far?

Drumroll please… Yes, the 5 was “excellent”.  Huzzah – we’re at 80% of surveys giving us a 4/5 or 5/5 on overall experience.  And we’ll sleep very soundly on our pillows for just a few minutes tonight, then back to work.

Conclusions/Final Takeaways

We built NudgeMail for people with (a) problems with other reminder/to-do systems and/or (b) problems managing their inboxes.  We’ve been drinking a decent amount of Kool-Aid internally, though knew full well that only a certain percentage of people would find a need for our service.  Beyond the basic analytics, we wanted to get our first feedback from the users themselves, and it’s quite encouraging. So… Thanks!

We have a lot of new stuff coming soon, including some asked-for features, some bug fixes, and a few other things we’ve been toying around with.  Will probably have our next update later this week!