Show HN: Collect instant user feedback directly on your website. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Collect instant user feedback directly on your website.

feedback.7scientists.com

45 pointsThePhysicist11 comments

A simple Flask application that allows you to add inline feedback elements to any website and collect user feedback on-the-fly without disrupting your user experience. Just add a small code snippet to your HTML and use special SPAN elements in your code to dynamically create feedback widgets wherever you want. All user input is sent to the feedback server asynchronously via jQuery, so no submitting of forms is required. The code of the application is available on Github:

https://github.com/adewes/instant-feedback

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The ability to rate with smileys can confuse the user.

One happy face is still a happy face. When you rate it 1 happy face, do you mean "I really don't like this feature, so I'm rating it the lowest I can, 1/5", or "I like this feature, it deserves a smiley"?

Case in point: positive 1-star reviews on app stores. "★☆☆☆☆ - This app is amazing!"

good point, thanks for the feedback!

But it makes me super happy, so I rate it 5 smiley faces..

It's an interesting idea. The comment at the bottom "This site uses Cookies. Get over it or get out" I'd be more formal with this, it's a shame to spoil what is otherwise nice presentation.

"This site uses Cookies" and link to the how and why instead.

Good point, I changed it!

FWIW, on my 13" macbook, after creating a survey I did not notice the multiple steps, other than the first block (settings) the others are completely below the fold so it took me a while to find them.

Then, I think you can safely load this code asynchronously, and minify the js.

Other than this: love it, it's something I meant to build myself for a long time :)

You may want to consider allowing the user to optionally pass a token identifying logged in users, not to identify who gives the feedback, but to avoid vote spamming.

Also as other said, you can use "increasingly smiling" smileys (think "sad, meh, eh, lol, rofl") to express satisfaction.

Nice idea. The star grading rating features gives instant feedback as you hover, so I expected the same from the thumbs up/down rating feature. Also, changing color to green/red when I click should be instant, not once the ajax has finished. Good job!

This looks cool.

One suggestion: make the vote/check icon mechanism asynchronous so that it shows up as selected on the client immediately.

I noticed this immediately too!

Thanks for the feedback, I'll think about how to improve this. Probably it would be good to add some kind of visual feedback while the user input is transferred to the server (like a spinner), since that will make it clearer that the inputs are saved instantly (some users were confused when not finding a submit button on the bottom of the page).

I think some visual feedback that the user's selection has been saved would be great. I also noticed the lack of a submit button. I think a send or submit button should always be provided for any text input boxes because you can't really guess when the user has finished typing (and it's likely to annoy users too).

Also, as others have said, the smiley rating could work if the first two faces are sad or unhappy. The middle face (number 3) is neutral (a straight line for the mouth - neither happy or unhappy) and then faces 4 and five are smiling.

Great site and service though - very clearly explained and presented. I can imagine a rating system could be popular on blogs or even help documentation. Most people don't post comments, but they may be more inclined to rate a post instead.

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