Discussion on how to use feedback

Feedback is a vital back of website maintenance, it allows you judge site usage, identify problems with the site and the quality of content that the site contains. But feedback has many wide uses in the internet today. For example YouTube use user feedback to rate videos.

This is done by users leaving comments on videos, and also by users rating the video’s out of five stars. But how can you judge the quality of the feedback, on YouTube most comments are pointless and simply spam for example:

“WIOOTTOTOTOTTOTTOOT ITS FINALLY EHREHEHEHREHREH WOOTOWOTWTOWOGWAOSFOASGFdas
gfdasgfsADGS!!!”

And

“PLEASE DON'T READ THIS. You will get kissed on the nearest possible Friday
by the love of your life. Tomorrow will be the best day of your life. However,
if you don't post this comment to at least 3 videos, you will die within
2 days. Copy and paste this, to be saved”

These comments were found on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAUqo6LAy_Q

Also most videos seem to become little discussion boards that seem to constantly stem away from the point of the video that has been posted. So obviously this gives the users no insight in to the use of the video, the quality, or the actual content. Also people usually overrate most videos or underrate them instead of giving them a proper review.

However in a non commercial business like YouTube, user feedback is not as important as in the e-commerce market. And no other online retailer uses feedback and user information better then amazon (in my opinion)

Feedback in amazon helps customers give an informed opinion about the products that they are going to buy. Of course just like on YouTube useless or incorrect comments could be posted that led customers of amazon to incorrectly purchase an item. For example

“ = Fun = Overall
collectors edition, 11 Jan 2007
Reviewer: dark gran - See all my reviews

I’ve i think all i can see about supreme commander and i had total analation
which was good but fairly bad graphics this tho just is possable the best
game for a long long time i thinks this mit evern get to be more popular
than red alert 2 o yer does any one know what extras the collectors edition
gives”

Gives little or no information about the item, yet says it is the best. People may for some reason use this information seriously and purchase the item and be disappointed with it because of this review. However Amazon allows users to rate the feedback that over customers have given for an item, this of course gives you a more informed decision by you are guessing that the other people who are rating the review also know what they are talking about, so how do you rate feedback, and how do you act on feedback that you have received.

FYI that review was found useful by one out of forty eight. And was found at http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product//B000FNA2QY/026-3545075-5083602


Of course there are other types of feedback that are not just limited to commerce or website review, but also technical. These however are handled in a rather different way for example, Creative. With the launch of windows vista and all the new features that affect hardware especially in the games industry creative have had to launch new drivers.

So they created beta drivers, and also a discussion forum which also acts as a user feedback form in a way. Customers of creative, come with their problems or success stories and list stories on the forum. Other users reply with similar stories that they have had and how they fixed it in order to help the other person.

But this also acts as feedback for creative, this is because creative monitor the forum and read the threads. They then discover problems that customers are having with the driver, e.g. 5.1 surround sound doesn’t work with beta driver and X-Fi extreme audio sound card running under vista. This allows them to investigate the problem and release an updated driver that solves the problem. It also has another useful feature of it allows them to monitor which updates are more important by the topics that are generating the most post and/or threads on the forum.

As the forum is generally customer help customer, there is also the danger of people coming to the forum posting information and then another customer deliberating trying to damage the other persons PC, e.g. telling them to wipe their hard drives through a series of DOS commands. So how do you monitor a large forum for content to make sure your users stay safe?

Forum at http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board?board.id=Vista

Main Discussion points

· How do you effectively rate feedback?
· How do you use feedback that you are unsure of?
· How do you monitor feedback effectively?
· What is the best method of feedback?
· Could user forums be successfully implemented for feedback on an e-commerce
site like amazon?