Capturing user feedback

Being able to discover what users think about your website is essential. The fact that you can solicit feedback across an entire website is something I find very exciting. No, really. What you do with the data is a whole other kettle of fish but it’s that ability to ask a visitor for feedback at any point of your user journey means that, in theory, you’ve lots of useful stuff to help you work on future site iterations.

For the launch of Boring Studnet and MyLongLunch, the plan is to have a horizontal feedback button either on the left or right edge of the site. It will simply read ‘Feedback’ and be visible and clickable from any page on the sites. Clicking it will pop up a little free text box, so that users can provide their thoughts/bugs/ideas throughout the entire site. Sound familiar? Totally, I see it every day on my favourite URL shortening site, bit.ly!

Having development resource means we have the ability to build our own feedback mechanism into our sites but what if you really don’t want to embark on another building mission? Personally I would say that if you can, try and build your own form as that way you capture the info you want but don’t worry if you can’t as there are a few companies out there who will handle site feedback for you at a relatively low cost. Here are a few solutions for website feedback I’ve come across.

Suggestion Box: Suggestion Box isn’t strictly about website feedback but I thought I would mention it as it’s a great way for consumers to suggest improvements to a business or the products and/or services they provide. Though at time of looking at Suggestion Box there were a number of impressive organisations listed, such as Nike, Linkedin and even Obama, it’s not limited to big organisations and anyone can create a Suggestion Box account simply and for free (using their 30-day free trial). There’s a weath of administrative tools and they provide a unique url for you to point users at so they can provide honest and anonymous feedback. Suggestion Box subscription after the free trial starts at a not-too-credit-crunch-friendly $50/month.

Crowd Source: Crowd Source is a site developed by a company called intrideas. Their feedback application appears to work by integrating a widget into your site. This method adopted by Crowd Source has its advantages, as you draw lots of attention to the feedback element and can make it immediately clear to the site visitor what sort of feedback you’re after, along with being able to put the widget on other sites, not just your own. Its disadvantages include possibly not being able to incorporate it onto every single page as there simply isn’t the space on your site, along with having to put up with the Crowd Source widget design and potentially annoy the consumer as it lacks any subtly. Crowd Source offers a free version with some neat features such as spam and profanity filtering or a plus version for about $10/month letting you customise the widget and have SSL security for admins.

User Voice: User Voice is my favourite of the three as it has all the features I like. Firstly the feedback mechanism is simply a small feedback button which sits to the left hand-side of the page, on every page of your site. Secondly User Voice has a nice way of presenting user feedback in tables and allowing you as the site owner to comment on this feedback and make all this public, so people can see you’re listening and making changes (or not making changes but at least listening to their feedback). Thirdly, fourthly and fifthly it just has the edge when it comes to design and usability when compared to the other two, so User Voice gets a big thumbs up from me. Though there is a free version for up to 10,000 contributions, after that the prices do leap to almost $300/month for the never level up, enabling 20,000 active users.

Remember that user feedback is so so very valuable and if you can’t do anything with it visitors will notice this, cease to contribute and eventually cease to visit your site! If you can do something about it, make sure you create a song and dance about this – they need to know about it!