Software for collecting and acting on feedback?
December 16, 2024 6:26 AM Subscribe
Looking for suggestions on software to collect, categorize, prioritize, and publish feedback, details inside.
Yes, this is for MetaFilter.
We get a lot of feedback and it would be good to collect said feedback, put it in a central database for a team to view, decide on priorities of said feedback, and be able to publish reports about the feedback.
My ideal workflow is being able to select some text in a comment on MeFi then right click on said text and select an option that says "Add to (Software name)" and given the option to categorize as it's added or even add a new category at that time. Options to record the url of the feedback would be good, along with other info.
These are pie in the sky wishes from someone who's never done anything like this before, so the specific scenario above might not be possible (and that's fine). But being to collect, categorize, prioritize (take votes on what to prioritize within the software?!), and publish feedback is the main goal.
What do you suggest?
Yes, this is for MetaFilter.
We get a lot of feedback and it would be good to collect said feedback, put it in a central database for a team to view, decide on priorities of said feedback, and be able to publish reports about the feedback.
My ideal workflow is being able to select some text in a comment on MeFi then right click on said text and select an option that says "Add to (Software name)" and given the option to categorize as it's added or even add a new category at that time. Options to record the url of the feedback would be good, along with other info.
These are pie in the sky wishes from someone who's never done anything like this before, so the specific scenario above might not be possible (and that's fine). But being to collect, categorize, prioritize (take votes on what to prioritize within the software?!), and publish feedback is the main goal.
What do you suggest?
Seems like bug tracking software could work for this. A Github repo? Jira?
posted by bowbeacon at 6:45 AM on December 16 [4 favorites]
posted by bowbeacon at 6:45 AM on December 16 [4 favorites]
a Google Sheet that does this + copy/paste would work fine in the meantime for a low-volume site such as Mefi.
Yeah I want to recommend this. Set up a data validation drop-down for your categories and then your workflow is:
Copy text
Paste into Google sheet
Select category in the next column from a drop down
Add URL to the next column
I'd recommend also adding the date of the request
Looking for the perfect tool is often the enemy of the good. ETA: In a shared environment you don't always want fancy software everyone has to use/learn.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:52 AM on December 16 [17 favorites]
Yeah I want to recommend this. Set up a data validation drop-down for your categories and then your workflow is:
Copy text
Paste into Google sheet
Select category in the next column from a drop down
Add URL to the next column
I'd recommend also adding the date of the request
Looking for the perfect tool is often the enemy of the good. ETA: In a shared environment you don't always want fancy software everyone has to use/learn.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:52 AM on December 16 [17 favorites]
A classic mistake for teams is to focus first on the technology, rather than on the process and the people.
Rather than getting/learning/using a new piece of software, I'd instead recommend tools you already have available to do this. Once you've get a few months experience of doing it, then you can look again at technology, but now with the knowledge of exactly what you need, what you would find most useful, number of times you use it a day, and so on.
I recommend starting with a Google Sheet. Set it to writable by your team and maybe a few users that you trust, and make it world-readable. Have columns for category, quotes from users, links to comments, effort to implement, assessment by the team, planned actions, due date. Start doing this today. Get the whole team to add things to it, and regularly discuss the entries. After using it for a few weeks, have a retrospective and adjust the columns to fit your workflow better. Then, in a few months, ask this question again, but with real-world information on how your first version has worked.
On preview - what warriorqueen says.
posted by siskin at 6:53 AM on December 16 [18 favorites]
Rather than getting/learning/using a new piece of software, I'd instead recommend tools you already have available to do this. Once you've get a few months experience of doing it, then you can look again at technology, but now with the knowledge of exactly what you need, what you would find most useful, number of times you use it a day, and so on.
I recommend starting with a Google Sheet. Set it to writable by your team and maybe a few users that you trust, and make it world-readable. Have columns for category, quotes from users, links to comments, effort to implement, assessment by the team, planned actions, due date. Start doing this today. Get the whole team to add things to it, and regularly discuss the entries. After using it for a few weeks, have a retrospective and adjust the columns to fit your workflow better. Then, in a few months, ask this question again, but with real-world information on how your first version has worked.
On preview - what warriorqueen says.
posted by siskin at 6:53 AM on December 16 [18 favorites]
Mod note: Couple of comments removed. Please just focus on answering the question and avoid adding dismissive commentary, as is the usual rules in AskMe, thanks.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:11 AM on December 16 [2 favorites]
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:11 AM on December 16 [2 favorites]
To add a bit to warriorqueen and siskin, one option might be adding Google Keep to the mix. You can select text, right click, send it to Keep; then on a daily rotation, open Keep as a sidebar to Sheets and enter the data there. That way you have the comment in full captured along with its user/date, but also have the relevant columns in Sheets. (Prioritization votes could then take place within Forms.)
posted by mittens at 7:24 AM on December 16
posted by mittens at 7:24 AM on December 16
Google sheet, copy paste.
In the long run, hire a dev for a couple hours to make a chrome extension to automate copy/paste into the google sheet.
posted by sagc at 7:34 AM on December 16
In the long run, hire a dev for a couple hours to make a chrome extension to automate copy/paste into the google sheet.
posted by sagc at 7:34 AM on December 16
You might look at Airtable. It can be used like a regular spreadsheet, which makes it approachable for people, but it has a lot of additional database functionality that you can build in as you go.
It also has the add ons that you're looking for, ex: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/airtable-web-clipper/fehcbmngdgagfalpnfphdhojfdcoblgc?hl=en&pli=1
posted by ambulanceambiance at 7:39 AM on December 16
It also has the add ons that you're looking for, ex: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/airtable-web-clipper/fehcbmngdgagfalpnfphdhojfdcoblgc?hl=en&pli=1
posted by ambulanceambiance at 7:39 AM on December 16
I'm in charge of customer insights at a nonprofit and what you are talking about is basically customer insight. Currently as we're building up this function we are relying on manual notes, spreadsheets, and rudimentary categorization and scoring Excel worksheets. For larger datasets we may play with text analysis tools like Voyant. (Which is free but doesn't do what you're looking for, it's more for pulling the feedback out of larger volumes of text.) But more sophisticated tools do exist if you're willing to pay money.
I agree with most of the answers that you should start small with something rather home grown to get a better sense of your needs. However if you want to see what is out there (just to see what functionality exists if nothing else), you might look into customer insights and qualitative research platforms like Dovetail, Marvin, Tetra Insights, etc.
posted by misskaz at 7:55 AM on December 16
I agree with most of the answers that you should start small with something rather home grown to get a better sense of your needs. However if you want to see what is out there (just to see what functionality exists if nothing else), you might look into customer insights and qualitative research platforms like Dovetail, Marvin, Tetra Insights, etc.
posted by misskaz at 7:55 AM on December 16
Fider is an open-source tool for managing feature requests and feedback (e.g. here).
posted by casaubon at 8:00 AM on December 16 [2 favorites]
posted by casaubon at 8:00 AM on December 16 [2 favorites]
I'd go with manual copy-paste into a Google Sheet or Airtable, with fields for, eg, level-of-effort and priority. For this specific context, ease of onboarding and sharing is key. There is more specialized software for this but I think it's premature to go to it. I do Big Fancy Expensive Consulting in my day job, specifically around software development. I always advise a team to start with a very lightweight flexible approach - which usually means some variation on "throw it in a spreadsheet and iterate on that" - and only move on to more expensive and specialized tools when you know you've outgrown the spreadsheet (or doc, or whatever.) Familiarity, ease of onboarding, and ease of changes are huge factors here; you don't have to learn the tool because basically everybody knows it or can easily google up or ask about "how do I do add a column" or similar. Focus your efforts on process and let the tools follow.
posted by Tomorrowful at 9:49 AM on December 16 [2 favorites]
posted by Tomorrowful at 9:49 AM on December 16 [2 favorites]
Instead of cutting and pasting, due to the excess verbosity of some comments, I'd just make my own spreadsheet and write a short summary whenever I saw a comment needing to be added.
posted by Miko at 9:51 AM on December 16 [2 favorites]
posted by Miko at 9:51 AM on December 16 [2 favorites]
Please use google sheets. It's free, shareable, and even works for capturing when you delete relevant comments from posts you posted yourself. Cool cool nothing to see here.
posted by donnagirl at 1:03 PM on December 16 [6 favorites]
posted by donnagirl at 1:03 PM on December 16 [6 favorites]
Aside from the desired workflow to capture the idea, which you described in your Ask, pls also think about what you want to do once you actually have that data. You mentioned "categorize, prioritize, and publish feedback" so think a bit more about what that looks like. I've been in groups where they realized a year later that the tool they selected only took care of data collection, but not the analytics or reporting, because they hadn't given the output much thought. And it ended up being that the data collected could not be used as it was not structured in such a way to make reporting, scoring, prioritizing easy.
That being said, focusing simply on the data collection aspect and the workflow you mentioned, I've seen this done using Jira. For example, in our megacorp with tens of thousands of employees, a Product X's Jira project is available read-only to the wider employee group. So I, as a user of Product X, could search the list of current bugs / feature requests to see if my issue or something similar had already been logged. I could also see in the comments what the Product Management team (the group that decides what ultimately gets implemented/fixed or not) decides. I can read comments that say it was scheduled to be worked on in Q1 2024, and then that more issues were found during testing so it was delayed to Q2, and then another comment saying that the introduction of some other feature made this issue irrelevant, so they closed it. There's a mechanism to vote for issues, so if someone else had already submitted what I am experiencing, I can essentially add my "+1."
The Product Management team then can see all the Jira issues entered within a certain time frame, review / sort based on # of votes, prioritize and add to the next development sprint, etc.
Now the above example lets people outside of the immediate decision-making team (the Prod Management team in my case, the mod/admin team in MeFi's case?) enter feedback. You may or may not want to open it up in your case, since you lose control over the type and quality of the data collected. So going back to the workflow you described, I'm pretty certain there are browser extensions that allow you to create Jira tasks/issues based on text and screen shots from the page you are viewing. Just keep in mind some may be 3rd party and you may need to pay for them on top of the Jira licenses. Here's one example that is on Jira's App Central.
For publishing feedback, if you have your Jira instance set-up so it is accessible by the public in read-only mode, then any comments in the issue can be read by visitors to the site. So you "publish" as in add a MeFi employee comment stating "We are closing this ticket because the defined use case will be addressed by this other Issue # 123." and anyone who bothers to look up that particular issue and its current status etc. can read that for themselves. It's not "publish" as in send a notification blast to all, but in the sense that your comments will be visible to more than just the immediate decision-making group of admin/employees/volunteers.
I am most familiar with Jira, but I bet other project/product management type tools could do similar things.
posted by tinydancer at 2:31 PM on December 16 [1 favorite]
That being said, focusing simply on the data collection aspect and the workflow you mentioned, I've seen this done using Jira. For example, in our megacorp with tens of thousands of employees, a Product X's Jira project is available read-only to the wider employee group. So I, as a user of Product X, could search the list of current bugs / feature requests to see if my issue or something similar had already been logged. I could also see in the comments what the Product Management team (the group that decides what ultimately gets implemented/fixed or not) decides. I can read comments that say it was scheduled to be worked on in Q1 2024, and then that more issues were found during testing so it was delayed to Q2, and then another comment saying that the introduction of some other feature made this issue irrelevant, so they closed it. There's a mechanism to vote for issues, so if someone else had already submitted what I am experiencing, I can essentially add my "+1."
The Product Management team then can see all the Jira issues entered within a certain time frame, review / sort based on # of votes, prioritize and add to the next development sprint, etc.
Now the above example lets people outside of the immediate decision-making team (the Prod Management team in my case, the mod/admin team in MeFi's case?) enter feedback. You may or may not want to open it up in your case, since you lose control over the type and quality of the data collected. So going back to the workflow you described, I'm pretty certain there are browser extensions that allow you to create Jira tasks/issues based on text and screen shots from the page you are viewing. Just keep in mind some may be 3rd party and you may need to pay for them on top of the Jira licenses. Here's one example that is on Jira's App Central.
For publishing feedback, if you have your Jira instance set-up so it is accessible by the public in read-only mode, then any comments in the issue can be read by visitors to the site. So you "publish" as in add a MeFi employee comment stating "We are closing this ticket because the defined use case will be addressed by this other Issue # 123." and anyone who bothers to look up that particular issue and its current status etc. can read that for themselves. It's not "publish" as in send a notification blast to all, but in the sense that your comments will be visible to more than just the immediate decision-making group of admin/employees/volunteers.
I am most familiar with Jira, but I bet other project/product management type tools could do similar things.
posted by tinydancer at 2:31 PM on December 16 [1 favorite]
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posted by humbug at 6:38 AM on December 16 [1 favorite]