Session 5A
Covener: Siko Bouterse

What are the best ways to build systems that collect feedback?

Question to think about: Are you trying to provide forum for customer self-service or trying to structure high quality feedback into the backend feedback

Grace schools: We email powerusers wireframes and they send feedback via the forum with regard to their thoughts on parenting and schools.

Jeremy Latimer (Impact Workforce):

Q: How do you scale qualitative feedback and have that compete with quantitative data. How can 10 people stand up to the thousands of usability points?

• You can only set the expectations that we may not act on the feedback.
• All of Blogger engineers are now on Twitter. Must tie back the feedback loop.

Q; Has anyone put a survey in the forum and get nothing back?

• Surveys in the forum that are too long might not be very effective

Q; how do you judge a good survey?
- Garth Lewis (MSFT). It returns actionable results
- People with feedback tends to have complaints. Recruiting is a really important in terms of getting the right audience. You can have different response rates in different arenas.

Q: Are you guys extracting sentiments? Keyword extraction?
- A few years ago, there was a study to measure health of the forums (automatically) to gauge the responses. There’s a lot of work going on.
- Seems that you need more robust techniques to combine these automatically collect quantitative data with the qualitative data.

Q: Why not build a product for beginners and advanced users?
- Firefox has tips and tricks for the beginner, medium user and advanced user
- One approach is to have Google keeps things simple but is very powerful & fast.
- For Adwords, making the tools simpler hasn’t been the answer because there are so many different types of people using the product.

• Apply insights on feedback that fits with the business objective.

Q: Is anybody using a feedback platform suc as Dell Ideastorm?
- Ajay: We made one called “Accept (Except?) Software” A lot of companies don’t make the backend process transparent. If you want to collect feedback you must let them know what’s going to happen to their idea. This platform allows you to gain followers and it bubbles up. The challenge is you’re self-selecting a group of people
- Allow the user to tag escalated bugs in the forum.
- The ideal platform should be able to sort several ways. i.e. sort by recent date, Top Contributor’s idea, relevancy.
- Using currency: You have $100 bucks and you can invest in an idea.

Q: has anyone mobilized the 1% from the less talkative?

• The poweruser has some admin power to give feedback to the team.
• Matt: Private forum where developers meet the users. A term limit would be good.

Q: Does anyone have forums for pre-teens?

• Matt: @Yahoo! There was IM product for teens. Created a private forum that allows the kids to see mock-ups and get their thoughts.
• Idea: Micro-survey. An activity based survey that’s not given to the user all in one shot, but rather over time after they’ve done an action. i.e. Filled out the profile.