In the tech community, it’s almost impossible to not feel that data is king. We use it to track organizational health, report to shareholders, and evaluate metrics ranging from basic website activity to new product releases. The quantitative tools and methods we use are great at answering what and how, but they fall short in understanding why.

Only qualitative feedback allows your audience to express how they feel, in a way that you can’t capture via clickstream data or cohort analyses. While I’m an advocate for the necessity of quantitative data, it must be supplemented with qualitative input to fully understand your customers and their relationship to your business.

Here are a few methods I’ve worked with that are great at capturing qualitative feedback:

Customer Service & Social Media
This is a very simple way to maintain an ongoing feedback loop from both existing and new customers, and someone on your team is likely already doing this. Even if it’s a weekly check-in with the person who manages your customer service box or social media stream, make sure you’re aware of the sentiment on everything from your brand to specific features.

Onsite feedback tools (e.g. 4Q iPerceptions, KissInsights, Get Satisfaction)
There are now many tools that you can add-on to your site allowing visitors to leave feedback, both at the site-level and at the page-level. These are great for capturing pain points, which are helpful in comparing against trends in the click-data.

Usability
Perhaps the most specific way to get feedback is directly from users as they interact with your product. My own preference is in-person usability testing and not third party testing services (e.g. UserTesting.com), but what’s critical is that your user candidly discuss their reactions to the experience and rationale for each action. Check out Steven Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, which is a must-read for anyone thinking about website usability.

Segmented email surveys
As you collect email addresses from your users (and hopefully pull web metrics into your database), you’ll be able to build some very insightful cohorts. This is a great opportunity to reach out to segmented groups of your users and invite them to participate in targeted surveys. By it’s nature your feedback is limited to existing users, but it provides highly specific qualitative feedback.

No matter how you gather qualitative information, remember that it’s likely from a small sample of your audience that’s not statistically significant. The idea is to supplement your analyses and design decisions with qualitative information, but to never make decisions for the masses based on feedback from a few.

My perspective changed on February 4th of this year, playing quarterback in my regular touch football game on a sunny Saturday in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. In one quick throw, my humerus split in two and ended both the game and the use of my right (dominant) hand for the foreseeable future. Months later, the bone has mended with the support of a stainless steel plate, but my radial nerve is paralyzed. What this means is that I have control over closing my hand, but not extending my fingers or wrist. In some cases the nerve regenerates, in others it does not. No matter how this plays out, I’ll only have one useful hand for the next year at minimum.

Blogging may now be now twice as difficult, but it’s an opportunity to participate and to learn. I have a lot on my mind, and one good hand to write with. So from here forward, this will be an experiment in both process and writing as I practice left-handed, one-handed typing on topics that revolve around my work and my life.