#147: Feedback should be much easier to give
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Reporter: ndroftheline | Owner:
Type: feedback | Status: new
Priority: major | Milestone: Fedora 18
Version: | Severity: Neutral
Keywords: | Blocked By:
Blocking: |
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My IRC nick is: ndroftheline
Please briefly describe the interaction that caused you to file this
ticket:
n/a
Please note other IRC nicks that are involved in this interaction:
Please describe what action or positive change could be adopted based on
this feedback:
Dear Fedora Project rockstars,
Mainly my thought is that feedback should be easier to provide. I
understand the need to validate users to reduce/eliminate spam. I
understand there are some technical aspects to the current ticketing
system that make it very convenient. But feedback should be easier.
It's a core aspect of human behavior modification: to encourage adoption,
new behaviors must be incentivized. We want people to provide valid
feeback, right? How do we incentivize feedback?
Of course, a user with a good or bad experience may feel the incentive
automatically to tell people about it, and wilfully and purposefully seek
out a way to provide feedback. Unfortunately, I think these people are the
minority, and provide a generally skewed picture anyway - you're only
getting extremely motivated (and thus, biased) people's feedback, and thus
only dealing with the corner cases, and so the feedback is less useful.
In addition to these rare, powerful internally motivated cases, #fedora
has provided additional incentives in the simplest, most efficient way
possible: by asking. The repeating message from fedbot simply asks people
to provide feedback, and this is a great idea. However it is a fairly weak
incentive.
If a user does decide to provide feedback, they are presented with a text-
heavy, boring page - a weak counter-incentive. They are required to create
an FAS account, which while not difficult, is at the very least
inconvenient, especially for a new user who only wants to provide moderate
feedback. This, I would say, is a stronger counter-incentive. The
significance of these counter-incentives to providing feedback must not be
ignored.
If the goal of this feedback system is to get high-quality, regular
feedback that can help guide IRC improvements, we should (continue to)
increase incentives and/or decrease counter-incentives.
Some ideas to do this, and relative effort to accomplish each:
1. Simplify and beautify the feedback landing page with graphics and
charts, especially colorful buttons and a "how to feedback" graphical
flowchart. Easy.
2. Simplify and beautify the feedback form itself - it doesn't need to
look like a bug report to the user if it's just feedback on an IRC convo.
Keywords? Blocked by? Severity? Priority? From a noob perspective, these
things are confusing and do not provide useful information anyway; of
course, if somebody is upset, they'll say "priority: critical!" but this
doesn't give us any really useful information. Create a new, simpler,
easier feedback form, or migrate to a wholly different feedback system,
that uses a simpler, easier form. Think surveymonkey. Medium.
3. Use a channel bot to manage feedback, possibly in a dedicated channel.
This is a registered freenode user, so it's not totally anonymous and it
probably wouldn't be worthwhile to a spammer. It would allow the user to
reference the assocaited users very quickly and easily using IRC's
autocomplete features. It would give us a timestamp of the feedback which
we could later go through to review on an unpublished IRC log the Fedora
channel might have. Difficult, maybe impossible.
4. Create a karma system for #fedora support users. Perhaps make some kind
of position for IRC moderators, superusers, assistants, whatever you want
to call them - poeple who are active in IRC. Create a vote up/vote down
system that rewards them for being helpful and punishes them for being
mean, dismissive, unhelpful, or otherwise egregiously violating the
guidelines. Difficult, maybe impossible, and possibly a stretch.
I do not think a different feedback system is going to radically transform
our community, but it is a step we can take to improve it and learn from
our users, and not just the extremely happy or extremely disgruntled ones.
Ultimately I hope the feedback system can be renamed a "kudos system" as
our community becomes more positive and inclusive. For now, if we're going
to ask for feedback, let's incentivize it by making it pleasing and easy.
Any additional notes or logs:
Thanks for your feedback!
--
Ticket URL: <
https://fedorahosted.org/irc-support-sig/ticket/147>
irc-support-sig <
irc://irc.freenode.net/#fedora>
Feedback and tracking of issues for the folks who try and improve support in #fedora on
irc.freenode.net