Your best friend, anonymous

So, you just launched your startup. He is cool, everyone needs it, solves the most pressing problems of the potential audience (well, you think so), looks stunning and super-easy to use.

It takes a day, a week, a month, three ... Yes, attendance is not bad. Yes, the user base is growing. But I want more. How to understand what your users are missing? What are their service needs not covered? What is inconvenient to do? And on the contrary, what is done is great, and you should not change it in any way?
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The best thing you can do right now is to allow anonymous feedback (questions, ideas, bug reports) from users.



Nothing replaces the feedback of a living person from working with your application. Web analytics and a / b testing are powerful tools, but they begin to work in full force only on a large user base. While it is not there - feedback plays a major role.

Okay, user opinion is great. But why anonymously? The fact is that (surprise) people are not at all eager to write something to you. If the service came to taste - they begin to use it, no - just close the page.

If a person wants to write about his experience of communicating with your site, it means that he was seriously "hooked" on something, and it is better to listen to him. Therefore, it would be good to simplify the way for the user from intention to action: if you want to leave a review, just write it and click on “Send”. Everything.

For example: the web application I am working on now, 70% of reviews are from anonymous users. If anonymous messages were banned, this feedback simply would not exist.

Deal with motivation. Now to the technical part. Traditionally, specialized services are used to collect ideas, questions and bug reports from users. The most famous - Get Satisfaction , of the most common in Russia - UserEcho , Reformal and Copiny .

Disclaimer : I am not affiliated with any of the services in question, but I tried to work with everyone.

How does it usually look like sending a request through such a service?

That's how:





Hey guys, what are you doing ?! Enter email? Enter your name? Type the characters in the picture? All bye, I'm already gone.

The main task of the feedback service is (suddenly) to collect opinions and criticism of users. How could this task be accomplished in such a protective way?

So that you do not think that this is only Reformal such, here is a screenshot from Get Satisfaction:



And Copiny:



Yes, instead of allowing people to leave feedback without a headache, the creators of the services prefer to explain verbose why this can not be done .

When I first encountered this situation, I found it just incredible. Well, seriously, how can market leaders not understand the value of anonymous downloads? Fortunately, an acceptable option was eventually found:



Here we have limited ourselves to simple captcha, with which (I hope) even an impatient user will cope. Although I would have removed it. Thank you, UserEcho!

Summing up:

1. Respect the user's right to anonymity.
2. Use a feedback service that does not put people in the way.
3. Profit does not hesitate to wait!

PS Please, never, never, never use the usual Dull Form for feedback!


Anything is better than her :-)