Welcome back. It’s the biorhythmical (?) trough that follows lunch when eyes start closing and web developers slump over their Macs…
I’m in a session with Daniel Burka, creative director from Digg. He’s going to be talking about user feedback and how best to respond to it.
Differences between Pownce and Digg: Digg already has a user base who have ‘invested themselves’ in the site. They have the paradigms of use already engrained. ‘younger’ (by time, not by age) users are sometimes more resilient to change.
How does user experience affect what you do?
First ask whether the change is worth it. Know who your community is by participating yourself. Run focus groups on your new features. Finally, and importantly, define measures of success.
Types of feedback….positive, bug reports, negative feedback.
Important to look at types of negative feedback. Spot patterns – if you get negative feedback as soon as you change something then that’s probably ok. If you’re still getting the same feedback weeks later then you probably need to act.
Don’t react to everything that is asked for, obviously…instead look for patterns of response and react to these.
Look out for expert feedback and make the most of the (free) advice…
Spend a lot of time gathering implicit feedback – watch people using your site. The vast majority on the site will be silent – try to gather data from them too.
So what do youi do first? Nothing. Don’t react, wade in. Instead, sit on the feedback for a few days and identify themes. Then engage with the community – ring them up, email them. Finally, iterate any development.
Thanks for this, it’s a good summary of ideas I’d almost but not quite crystallised.