It is my sincere belief that the best way to improve a product is to ask its users for their opinions on how it can be improved.
So I have a proposal - incorporate an exercise feedback or comments system. People would be able to share their thoughts on the exercise, whether they teach the concepts well and whether the documentation is sufficient, and if there could be any improvements.
I understand that we already have forums for this exact purpose, but I don’t think that most of the users actually visit the forums or want to participate in them. Some or many might not even be aware that we have a forum.
For the user, the ability to reach out/leave feedback should be as frictionless and accessible as possible, and I think that requiring the user to do extra unnecessary steps (going to the forum, making a post) can cause friction which can cause the user to actually decide not to leave any feedback at all.
Of course there are probably other factors that I may have missed out, so i would like to hear your thoughts about such a feature, do you think it would be something useful, is it necessary at all? Perhaps you have some other suggestion for how to make leaving feedback more frictionless for the user?
I would think that whoever is sufficiently motivated to provide feedback will also be motivated enough to find an existing way to contact the team. Of course, we’d need to poll the users to see if that’s true.
I would guess (guess only!) that implementing another feedback mechanism would be very low on the todo list for the dev team.
We’re definitely suffering from some organisational scar tissue, but let’s just say that the friction is more of a feature than a bug.
In short: when it was easier to give feedback, the majority of feedback was extremely low quality, including contributions, which in turn led to maintainer burn-out. Are we missing out on (some) valuable feedback? Probably! But the feedback that does reach “us” in general now is really good (your post being case-in-point) because those who make the effort generally… make an effort.
And then a follow on question on or or “What could we do better?” with either some buttons and/or free-text.
The question though is who is reading though, and with 10k submissions per day, there’s a risk of lots of data and not much of a noise/signal ratio (@SleeplessByte’s point). But maybe we hear the same thing on lots of exercises and then maintainers can act on that.
It’s good to think about, and I’d appreciate others’ views too.
(Not actually suggesting emoji buttons before I get slaughtered for that :))
I see, that’s a good point. It does make sense that those who make the extra effort to leave feedback would be more likely to leave valuable feedback.
Though one supposed problem with relying on the minority for feedback could be that this minority might not accurately represent the importance of the feedback. What I mean is that if there’s only a few people leaving feedback then it’s more of a shot in the dark about whether the feedback is actually an improvement, and it could just be that person’s personal quirk that might not actually be a bother for the majority. Whereas if you have many people leaving the same feedback then it is much more likely that implementing the feedback would be effective for the majority of people.
The joys of tradeoffs. Lots of feedback (lots of noise to sift through) vs less feedback from those that actually care (less noise, less opinions). There’s rarely an obvious option with this sort of tradeoff.
