Introduction: The User Interface for software applications is designed for human interaction, ease of use and convenience. One aspect of building this engagement is the collection of feedback from the user on the relevancy, timeliness and appropriateness of content. Most users will not hesitate to provide a feedback when they have genuinely come across a satisfying experience. The software maker has the options to provide some utilities to collect this feedback at those anticipated moments during the engagement process. For example, when a work note appears on a service request and it has mitigated a concern for the user, a feedback link will be appropriate to be positioned next to the work note such that user can enter her feedback. This article delves into the considerations surrounding feedbacks, their number, format, content and their tradeoffs.
Description: The most common form of feedback is a rating mechanism. A simple count of one to five stars is sufficient to capture the sentiment of the user if a particular interaction was satisfactory. This is a quantitative assessment which can be followed up with a textbox for qualitative feedback. Together, they capture just enough information to help the maker improve or deprecate certain features and workflows. Such feedback mechanism finds great appeal at customer touchpoints that are mission critical and with high business value. It could be used at the end of a training or it could be requested at the end of a job submission. Long forms are sometimes a necessary evil in some workflows and the feedback mechanism is not only cathartic to the user but also ways for the maker to learn how to evolve the workflow in subsequent versions.
Not every feedback mechanism can include a survey or a form by itself. Some may simply be a yes or no answer. Others may involve a link to the user where the action of clicking the link alone is sufficient because it has been constructed with query parameters that convey all the relevant information to the maker. Feedback also can be solicited from devices other than the desktop by means of one-time messages to the user's personal handheld mobile devices.
The opportunity to provide feedback is appealing to many feature teams but they are pigeon-holed in delivering what is required from their component. The customer, on the other hand, may find such request one too many especially if they are forced to become selective because it taxes them when the overall engagement could be considered laborious. Usability often finds feedback mechanism as conflicting with its goals. The right number of feedback requests at the right touchpoints in the customer engagement is undeniably beneficial but the process of making it just right is fraught with many players, processes and prone to negligence from periodic reviews. Most feedback mechanisms and the policies associated with them do not even appear in the functional design or the architecture of a component or feature. Developers arguably ask why the feedback cannot be a floating control that can latch on to any page shown from the web-application rather than the component having to provide or implement a suitable tactical utility. Test teams may even deprioritize it from their test plan because telemetry cannot be forced on the user. Finally, the collection of feedback is significantly dependent on participation which may vary from audience to audience if not for the vagaries of the components in the overall product.
Indeed, interceptor mechanisms and floating controls are an incredible strategy for feedback collection because they remain perpetually available and bring consistency across the use of the product while relieving the feature teams from re-inventing the wheels. Where then can we find such examples of feedback collection if it weren't overloaded with other telemetry requirements. The commercial software products customer designed for consumer space is a great arena to find such examples.
Software such as MOpinion, InMoment, Clarabridge, Qualtrics, Feedbackify, Verint Foresee, OpinionLab, HubSpot, Survicate, and SurveyMonkey provide a breath-taking diversity in such techniques. Their offerings can be categorized as Voice of the customer tools, survey tools, Online Review tools, User testing tools, Visual feedback tools and community feedback tools. The right tool for the right feedback gathering requirement makes the process effective and efficient. At the same time, if there were no necessity to collect user feedback and if it could be learned by some other technique, that would not only relax the requirements but also enable the system to come up with an authoritative metric that would not be susceptible to user participation. One must however be careful to not relate cause and effect with this kind of a strategy since that will lead to errors which may skew the metric.
Conclusion: From the simple to the elaborate, feedback mechanisms provide various enhancements to a customer’s experience. Some of these are referred to in this article but the must all be enticing to the customer.
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