You need more feedback

Your users will probably find problems on your site before you do. Problems include; spelling mistakes, bad grammar, broken links, dead images, or just content that doesn’t actually make sense. So make your users part of your quality control… and make it easy for them to help you by providing a feedback mechanism which allows you to help them.

For feedback to work properly you need more than just the web author’s email link on the page. This might get some response, but isn’t much use if the author is on holiday or disappears. Instead, provide a feedback link to a proper form. It should let the user describe simply what was wrong or how they need help. Do not have any required fields in this form - the user is helping you so don’t straight-jacket them.

The form should collect technical data from the user - IP address, browser, page being browsed, and so on. I would argue that this should be collected invisibly - not because you are snooping, but because that data is superfluous to what the user is thinking about. However, you want it because it might help you to analyse their problem. You should include some information which explains what data is being collected for privacy purposes, but I would say keep it well out of the main focus area of the form.

Store the results of the form in a database, and then alert the web author(s) and the technical team by automatic email. Ensure that all queries are dealt with efficiently by managing the database of feedback like a trouble-ticket queue.

Adding a feedback form is easy - so I would go one better… add a fancy/nice/smart form. Instead of taking the user elsewhere why not make it pop up within the page or scroll neatly into the bottom page. Other enhancements you might consider include ratings and user-tagging - more on those in a future post.

Once the form is live, be prepared for all sorts of comments! We have a simple feedback form running on the Canterbury site. Many non-UK people use it to send requests for contact details or help. In some cases this tells us that the page isn’t clear enough, in other cases I think the user just prefers to ask the question and have the answer come to them rather than having to find it themselves.

Overall we get a good picture of what people want from the site, and specifically we get a view of what they think the site is lacking.