When building or upgrading a product, it’s often very helpful to get feedback from the users who use your product. Does something work well or could it be improved? Is there something that design missed that makes the product much better.

For websites, there are a number of services that provide you with HTML code that adds a Feedback tab to the side of the page. It’s always visible to the user, yet unobtrusive. Clicking on the tab brings up a little box with either a form for you to submit an suggestion or bug, or a list of suggestions that other users have added that you can vote on.

Being able to view another user’s suggestion can spark interest in submitting your own suggestion or to comment on an existing idea to flesh it out. Websites used to use the old fashion contact email which was a one-to-one correspondence. The user would email the website, the website would email back saying thanks. The end.  There was very little interaction.

An alternative to email was a forum. This was often time consuming to set up, to manage, and to keep track of. Off-topic discussions made feature requests hard to keep track of.  It allowed for more interaction between users, but was difficult to follow suggestions.

The feedback services today allow users to vote for the features they want most. This helps aggregate the texturized “I like” to a number that can be sorted. Depending on the feature, they can be made a higher priority in development.

Websites can also respond to feature requests publicly, for example mentioning that such feature is already available. If a feature is in the process of development, everyone can look forward to it instead of asking for it over and over. When a feature is completed, it is placed in the completed list for everyone to see.

For those who are familiar with developer bug tracking system, the user feedback services are more user friendly to visitors of all skill levels. The simpler it is for visitors to submit ideas and comments, the better chance the website has to get quality ideas, making a product even better.