Give voice to your suggestions and tell us what you think
When I get the chance I listen to a broad range of IT-related podcasts. Just recently I've been catching up on some of Scott Hanselman's Hanselminutes podcasts. In one of the recent episodes I was intrigued to hear about User Voice, an online service which allows website owners to quickly and easily gather feedback and comments from users via a cool little widget that you deploy on your site (see image below). Users can post new suggestions and comments or rate existing comments posted by other users, allowing you to quickly gain a feel for the issues that are important to your users. Scott is using User Voice on his BabySmash site to get feedback on the software from users, but you could user User Voice to gather feedback about anything.
I was so impressed with User Voice that I went right ahead and set up an account for Codefounders. You'll now find the green feedback tab on the righthand side of the Codefounders website. My intention is for users to be able to leave feature suggestions and comments about Powerdown, but you can also use it to leave us general comments about our website, or any other aspect of Codefounders you feel moved to comment on. You can also view and post feedback via the Codefounders User Voice site.
I'm currently working on a website redesign project for one of our clients and they want to gather some feedback from their users regarding what they want from the new site. I've persuaded our client to put a User Voice feedback widget on their site so they can get ideas directly form users whilst they are right there visiting their site and they are fresh in their minds. I'm not sure how successful it will prove to be in getting the right sort of input from users but there's no doubting that User Voice is a fantastic idea!
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