Get your users to tell you what they really want
We're building a site that we want people to love using, so we want as much feedback on it as we can get. From the get-go, we've had a big red UserVoice 'Feedback' button on the lefthand site of every page. But only a tiny proportion of our users ever suggested, voted or commented on an idea.
-
The red Feedback button was ubiquitous, but I bet that made it effectively invisible. Our feedback box is a straightforward text box that gets presented opportunely and prominently at the end of every learning session, at a moment when people will be most likely to have something they want to tell us.
-
We get an email every time someone drops in a suggestion, with the user's email address, so we can respond quickly to them individually. We very much want to follow up with people that have made the effort to give us feedback.
I'd say we're getting at least 5 times as many suggestions as we were.
On the downside, we don't have a nice communal forum any more that allows people to vote or comment on one another's ideas - we might do something about that in the future.
Here's what I wish UserVoice would do:
-
Make it much easier for people to suggest new ideas. Even if it were to bring down the overall quality, I think an increased volume of raw responses would be of greater value.
-
Charge straightforwardly based on the number of new suggestions. This would set up the right incentives for UserVoice to make it really easy for users to make new suggestions. N.B. I don't have a problem with paying - I just don't want to be forced to start out with a $100/mo plan when we have a tiny userbase in order to get features that I consider essential to the user experience.
-
Corollary: Don't withhold important features like single sign-on and white labeling the design for the exorbitant options.
[1] We compared UserVoice and GetSatisfaction pretty closely, and they both hike the prices if you want to be able to transfer login status across. In fact, GetSatisfaction didn't (at least at the time) allow anonymous suggestions, which felt like a huge barrier to entry to new submissions - this was what convinced me to try UserVoice in the first place.
[2] Hmm - perhaps this should be a command, e.g. 'Tell us what we can do to improve things'?