Neil posted today about restaurants and the challenge they have getting real feedback, assuming they’re one of the rare few who actually want feedback. The way we’ve been tackling feedback in BrainPark is to try and hide it from our users. Hide sounds a tad malicious but all that I mean is make feedback part of the application instead of soliciting feedback from users with forms and other garbage.

A somewhat trivial example, let’s say you’re building a code search tool for your intranet. You want to know when you’re search algorithm sucks and when it works so that you can improve it based on hard facts. What do you do? Add a “Did these search results help you?” form right? Ewww!

Build the feedback into your application. In this case, add an X beside each search result that allows the user to make that result go away. For the user, they can refine and shape the results to give them more value and reduce the noise. For you, you can now create reports that show your team precise examples, with real data, of where your search is failing.

If you could somehow add a similar feature that allowed the user to say ‘I should have saw this in my search results’ then you’re in even better shape. Now all your design/dev team has to continually reduce the amount your users have to ‘fix’ their search results.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 12:04 pm and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.