How your feedback shapes our platform: the power of your voice

A platform is only as powerful as the people who use it. If it’s not intuitive and valuable, users will look elsewhere. That’s why your feedback drives everything we do.

Have you ever had a frustrating experience with a website? Perhaps you were searching for a famous pancake recipe, but when you opened the page on your phone, the constantly rotating ads made it impossible to stay on the recipe for more than 10 seconds before you had to scroll down again. Eventually, you gave up and found another recipe website—because no famous pancakes are worth that much headache.  

Or maybe the opposite happened, and you found a website that made cooking a new dish seem easier than ever. No ads, a neatly organized shopping list at the top of the page, and step by step photos that you could follow. You can’t believe it— you just made Pad Thai at home!  

This is the power of user feedback. If a digital platform isn’t fun and easy to use, it doesn’t matter how fancy its latest features and designs are. If a platform doesn’t have the features users want, they’ll go somewhere that does. 

Here at Ratio.City, a division of Esri Canada, we take user feedback seriously because we know that your ability to use and enjoy the platform is what keeps people coming back.  

Having user feedback is so important for our product design that we have a dedicated role in the Ratio.City department for user research. When users tell us what isn’t working for them, what feels confusing, or what could be improved, our user research analyst collaborates with the product design team to find solutions. And when users love a certain feature or aspect of the design, we look for ways to build on that success. 

We are honoured to have a relationship with our customers where they feel comfortable giving us honest feedback, and they trust that they will see their requests reflected in our product.

User feedback is imperative in product design

How does Ratio.City gather feedback? 

We gather feedback in a variety of ways. The most common way is through user interviews, where we put out a call over email to find customers who have time to speak with our user research analyst. We use these general user interviews to get feedback on our existing features.  

The other method that we gather feedback is through usability testing, where users are asked to share their screen and use Ratio.City while the user research analyst gives them a series of tasks to complete. This is part of our testing and release process for new features. We usually run these tests 2-3 times per year as we release new designs and tools, and they are an important part of our understanding of whether new tools are able to blend seamlessly into existing processes.   

If the tasks are too difficult or confusing, then we know that we have to go back to the drawing board and redesign those features.    

In short, we want feedback on our existing features, and we want to test out how users like and navigate our new features.  

Our product team is proud to have a tight feedback loop. Collecting user feedback is important, but if nothing gets done with that feedback, it’s like putting a suggestion in a suggestion box and then emptying it right into the trash. Our user research analyst works closely with both the customer success team and product so that feedback is incorporated into product design and communicated back to the client. Every interview and usability test gets summarized and presented to the rest of the team so that everyone knows what our customers are looking for next.  

What’s trending in user feedback?

What are the most common trends in user feedback?  

More cities, more data
As city policies evolve, users expect their platforms to update along with them. Given that our data layers are uploaded and managed by a team of real people, this is no small task. Our team keeps up to date with industry news, the latest datasets, and the ever-changing landscape of Canadian urban planning to make sure that Ratio.City is always relevant.  

Real time collaboration
Email is out! Users want to see updates in real time and work on things together, not email documents back and forth for feedback. While email has been the status quo for years, the increasing capabilities of cloud computing means that today’s users want to be able to work on documents with their teammates in real time, without saving it to their computer, emailing a copy to their team, and waiting for them to email it back. It almost seems silly at this point to describe working this way, but this is how a lot of teams still do their work.  

Since we want to be ahead of the curve, we have been hard at work over the past year to create more collaborative working features.  

More demographic data
Many of our clients are not merely real estate developers, they are also trying to build communities. To do this, they are interested in more demographic data and more community features such as transit stops and schools. Our data team is hard at work ensuring that these features are easy to find in all our available cities.   

User feedback isn’t a nice to have, it’s a need to have. We work hard to develop relationships with our users and incorporate their requests and feedback into our product roadmap and designs. As a result, the Ratio.City platform is very easy to use and can easily be incorporated into workflows.