Ask HN: How do you collect valuable feedback?

11 points·quizbiz··3 comments

My next idea is to have a "is this good enough?" link on the bottom of every page link to a feedback form but that seems rather unprofessional.

Offering feedback@email does not yield results. An online form asking for user input won't yield specific improvements other than bug fixes.

How do you collect valuable feedback?

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UserVoice [1] and GetSatisfaction [2] are the big guys in customer feedback.

[1] http://www.uservoice.com/

[2] http://www.getsatisfaction.com/

I don't mean to be pedantic, but you need to be a bit more specific about what kind of valuable feedback you want. If you think along the lines of "if I had X information, I'd be able to do Y with my site."

If you're looking for user comments, put in a clearly marked link to a feedback page. Make sure that you ask what the users would like to see (offer a few example suggestions next to the form).

You could also use a javascript-based use tracker to see how users are using your site (I think there was a company that implemented this a while back, but you could probably make your own in a few hours). You can also use some web analytics packages or A/B testing to see what is actually being used on your site (i.e. what the users like about it).

EDIT: isharan mentioned ClickTale in his post, which was the company I was thinking about with the UI tracking.

Its actually pretty hard to get valuable feedback from a lot of users. Either users don't think too much about how the site could be improved or they're just too lazy to type it all out.

But yeah, being a little more specific would help. Looking for UI feedback? (Try this http://www.clicktale.com/) General feedback about the company?

The best thing to do is make it easier for people to give feedback.

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