Since October’s creation in 2014, we have continuously encouraged our lenders to share their ideas and feedback to improve their user experience on the platform. Many of you have contributed in the improvement of both the website and the mobile app by reporting bugs or providing new ideas that were later developed by our Tech team. In this article, we tell you all about how we improve our product, how your participation is key in this process and how it can benefit to all the October users.
How can you, lenders, help us improve the platform?
1. Share ideas of new features
A part of your feedback is dedicated to reporting bugs on the website, the web app and the mobile app that are interfering with your experience on the platform. When a bug is reported, we analyse it to check if we can give you a solution right away or if we have to investigate the issue and request a fix to our Tech team. Anyway, we will answer to you as soon as possible and keep you informed about the actions required to fix the bug. Let us share some examples to show you how we proceed:
- In June 2020, some lenders using the browser Safari had troubles creating an October account because of a bug on the birthdate. Even though they were older than 18 years old, they were considered underaged by our system. The bug was reported to the Product and Tech teams on the June, 3 and was considered high priority as it was blocking new lenders to finish their onboarding and solved very quickly. On June 4, the bug was fixed and lenders could finish to create their account.
- On March 2020, lenders detected a bug related to the display of the amount borrowed by companies on the website. Thanks to your support, we were able to quickly fix this issue by reporting it to our website developer.
All the projects presented an error on the amount borrowed by companies
Reporting a bug is not as easy as it looks. It needs to be clear and precise so we can understand the problem and help you effectively. That is why we added a new tool, called Hubcap, on our chat. Hubcap is a video-screen recorder that enables you to share bugs easily with our Support team. Your recordings will help us get a clearer view of the bug and solve it much faster.
2. Share ideas of new features
We encourage lenders to share feedback not only on bugs but also on improvements or new features you would like to see on the platform. Lenders send us ideas about their portfolio, the projects, the onboarding and many other topics. If a new feature is requested by many lenders and adds value, we may add it to our Tech roadmap.
Recently, we implemented 2 new features on the web and mobile apps, requested by our lenders:
- We improved the display of state-guaranteed loans to make it easier for lenders to identify these projects, by adding a tag and detailed information about the conditions of these projects. Lenders requested that new design because they could not know if a project was covered by the State until they read the project description.
- We also received a lot of feedback from lenders living abroad and having troubles authenticating themselves with the SMS code. In order to improve their experience, our mobile developer worked on a biometric verification system. On the October mobile app, lenders can now validate their transactions, change their password and output money using TouchID (fingerprints) or FaceID (facial features). Keep in mind that your phone need to have this technology to be able to use it!
The biometric verification replacing the SMS New display on State guaranteed loans authentication
3. Become a beta tester and/or participate in our user tests
Tech developments need to be tested before being released. That is why we created a beta test program for volunteer users. The point of this program is to allow those early testers to test the newest version of the app before the official launch and to get their feedback. They will use the app as they normally would and if they find a bug or something that could be improved they share it with our mobile developer who will use this information to finalise the version. To become one of our beta testers, read this article or contact us on the chat.Besides, our Product and Lenders team sometimes organise User Tests. In this online session, we assign a specific scenario to the voluntary testers to check how they use our platform and mobile app. The goal is to understand how they interact with our product and gather feedback on potential bugs and ideas of improvements.
How do we process your feedback?
Each of the conversations that we have with our lenders is registered and tagged (i.e. categorised). For example, we have “change of IBAN” or “Taxation” conversation. The one we are focusing on today is the tag “Feedback”, this tag is used when lenders send us bug reports or improvement ideas. We receive approximatively 10 feedback per month.
The Lenders team gathers all your feedback and is in charge to report them internally. To do so, they share a small description of the bug or the new feature requested by lenders with the Product team who will take over from there. Their main goal is to reproduce the bug or understand the idea, prioritise them within the product roadmap and work closely with the Tech team, who will fix the bug or develop the idea.
To be more precise, bugs are prioritised depending on their severity. If the bug hinder the basic use of the platform it will have a higher level of priority than a smaller bug. The ideas are prioritised based on the amount of requests we receive, their feasibility and the Tech resources available.
The development time is really flexible, it can go quick for small updates but it can also be a long process for bigger ones.
We deeply value your feedback (positive and negative) and encourage you to keep sharing your ideas to provide you with the best experience possible. We hope this article helped you have a better understanding on how your ideas are treated on October. Our Lenders Team is at your disposal if you have any questions.