Gathering user feedback

The mantra of the web 2.0 app is to release early, iterate often, and repeat. A big part of the “iterate often” though, can be confused for rolling on your own intuition. Even a great dog-food eating developer won’t be able to guess exactly what his or her customers want. After all, every individual is different.

This past week, the buzz in the developer world was/is Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky’s stackoverflow.com. One particular off-topic item that immediately caught my eye was the floating “Feedback” tab on the left side of the screen. I thought this was brilliant. It was an personal invitation for users of the site to express their opinions and cast their vote on suggestions for improvement. 

After clicking on this Feedback tab, I realized that this was a service provided by UserVoice. The folks at UserVoice have come up with a simple, easy-to-install widget that every web service out there can take of advantage of to quickly gather valuable user feedback. Brilliant.

Being a big fan of gathering feedback for product direction, I decided to look into it for Ronin. By the time I hit publish on this blog entry, you’ll be able to find the Feedback tab in your Ronin account. Use freely.