Importance, Applications & Treatment of User Feedback

Via Adam Schwabe : Top-10 Application Design Mistakes by web usability guru, Jackob Nielsen.

1. Non-Standard GUI Controls: What I find true "If Jakob’s Law is "users spend most of their time on other websites," then Jakob’s Second Law is even more critical: "Users have several thousand times more experience with standard GUI controls than with any individual new design.". And its not a good idea to play with user experience and experiment with their behaviour. The other most important more than anything

4. No Feedback: It’s like treating user with dis-respect, no we don’t want to hear from you. User feedback is most important in uderstand the users requirements and most of the times they will end up doing you a big favour by pointing out critical design or business issues which you never even imagined.

Let’s start with the importance of user feedback for a web site : BlogOhBlog, GuideStar & Figby

Online Journalism Review – User feedback drives five principles for multimedia news on the Web:

1: Avoid an information overload

2: Have users’ expectations concerning interaction functionality in mind

3: Be careful using animation

4: Let users fully control the interaction

5: Involve users in testing your graphics

What are the objectives of user feedback ? SDCN explains the common objectives for any site:

* to learn who their users are;

* to gauge their impressions of the site;

* to understand their needs; and

* to address any problems they encountered with the site.

They further explain how to seek feedback, organizing incoming user information, responding to users and how to utilize feedback. You can start from here

Paul Rouke points out top 8 business benefits of user testing

Webmaster World has a discussion thread on how to get user feedback

How to listen to your user’s feedabck : On the other hand Jeff Atwood tells not to listen to your users. If you listen to your users on all things, you may not get the right picture. There is a way to do it and Jeff evaluates the pros and cons. I also believe that you need to filter the user feedback, judge it, evaluate it and then decide to apply. Most of the stuff you may not apply, as it may be a personal view, wrong observation, misunderstanding by a user or just a plain false statement. Will Kern also shares some such similar views on how to take user feedback with a grain of salt

Evolving with user feedback: Imaginginfo explains on how Nikons new website is planning to evolve with user feedback. Ground Report has some quick comments from various participatory media sites

Related posts:

1. From web users to web curators & it’s importance for media

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