How to work with feedback in online communities?
If you’ve ever worked on anything for an online community, most likely the following situation is very familiar to you.
Your team and you have spent several months carefully thinking through a social initiative or developing a new feature. Finally everything is ready and you are happy to share the results with the community for feedback.
Expectation: Positive and encouraging feedback, active participation in the proposed initiative and adoption of the new feature.
Reality: The entire focus of the users is on looking for all the possible issues in what you have and the reasons why it will not work.
Has this happened to you? How did you feel at that moment? Probably you had a feeling of devastation and injustice and it seemed that users only saw the small issues that could be easily fixed and were missing the point and undervaluing all the hard work that had been done. Usually developers, product managers and all other types of employees completely lose any desire to ask the community for any feedback after experiencing such a situation a few times. The users begin to seem to them like critics, capable only of negativity.
Let’s take a look at a few suggestions on how to reduce the stress of asking for feedback and get the most out of it.
Tl;dr
- The idea of asking for feedback implies that users will look for improvements of what you’ve shared with them.
- Most feedback, even negative ones, are written by the most engaged users.
- It is important to moderate toxic feedback.
- To make the feedback constructive, set the boundaries of the discussion in the announcement itself.
- Tell the community about your ideas and your developments as early as possible.
- Feedback from users is just suggestions, not a commitment.
Any feedback, positive or negative, is left by the most engaged members of your community
It’s worth mentioning that most people who really don’t like something about your community left it in the first place when they encountered something they didn’t like. It is unlikely that they would go as far as posting feedback for a new feature. The authors of any feedback, including negative ones, in most cases are active, loyal members of your community.
For most active users, giving feedback is just a way to increase their contribution to the community.
Why does feedback seem negative?
First and foremost, positive feedback does not provide information that will help make the initiative better. When you share your work with the community for feedback, users intuitively see it as an opportunity to help you improve your ideas. They begin to look for shortcomings and propose their own ideas, even if the current version looks fine to them.
As a result, any place dedicated to feedback will look as if it was “negative”. In reality this is not the case.
It is important to distinguish between toxic feedback and helpful feedback
One way or another, most of the feedback in the community will be about issues, shortcomings or possible improvements of your work, but some of it will be helpful and some will be toxic.
Toxic feedback is characterized by the fact that it is aimed at the personality of the author of the post, it contains accusations or disdain, toxic feedback does not contain any specifics, or humiliates the dignity of others.
At the same time, helpful feedback is based on verifiable facts, is specific, relevant to the context being discussed, is respectful, and often contains specific suggestions for possible solutions.
Keep helpful feedback and thank its authors but moderate out everything that is toxic.
What can one do to make feedback helpful?
When you post an announcement of a new feature or initiative, you have the opportunity to set the rules of the game. All you need is to add a specific question or request to the end of the post, which will clearly describe what exactly you expect to see from the users. When you ask the users for something specific, you set strict boundaries for the further discussion and anything beyond these boundaries will be considered off-topic. You and other active users can easily moderate feedback in this case.
Another aspect to look at is a culture of reasoning in your community. Toxic feedback in most cases comes down to the expression of subjective opinions, which rarely can be supported by logical reasoning. Once you make it mandatory to provide reasoning for any feedback, the number of toxic feedback posts will reduce to almost zero.
How to get the most out of feedback? Share your work with the community as early as possible!
People tend to think about how others think about them and what they do. Therefore, we often postpone sharing our work until very late in the process. At the same time, the correct approach is to never wait for the final version of a feature and share what you have as soon as you have the minimum. The longer you wait to share about your work:
- The harder it is to mentally hear about shortcomings in your solution.
- The harder it is to implement suggestions.
- The harder it is for users to show off their skills and help you.
It is much easier to listen to feedback when you have invested a minimum of your time in the current solution. Moreover, the less invested you are in a particular implementation, the easier it is to abandon it if the users do not like it or there is an obvious flaw in the approach.
Developing something useful for a community largely comes down to working collaboratively with the users of the community. The more “raw” the ideas you share with the users, the more space there is for them to show off themselves, and for you to add some of the users’ ideas to the final product. If users are involved in anything that makes it to production, then they develop a very strong sense of ownership of the community and want to invest in it even more.
Feedback is about recommendations, not “must do” things
Feedback is a powerful tool for engaging users and improving quality of the product. At the same time, many product people treat feedback as something very strict — if a user has written something, then it either must be done or challenged. In fact, feedback discussions are more like brainstorming sessions about “how to improve an existing solution” and “what else cool to do within the current limitation.” The purpose of these brainstorm sessions is to look at the proposed implementation from the outside, through the eyes of active users. Not more than that.
The best way to stop worrying is to treat feedback as interesting suggestions from other people. Remember that the default answer of any good product manager to any suggestion is “no.”
User feedback can play a critical role in your success. All you need is to approach it correctly!