Enhancing Product Documentation: Thoughtful Page Feedback Mechanisms

In the realm of product documentation, the value of user feedback cannot be overstated. It serves as a compass, guiding technical writers toward clarity, relevance, and user-centricity. However, not all feedback mechanisms are created equal. While simplistic “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” ratings might seem convenient, they often fail to capture the nuances of user experience, leading to skewed insights and missed opportunities for improvement.

Consider this scenario: A user encounters frequent billing issues with a product, leading to frustration and dissatisfaction. In such a state of mind, even impeccably crafted documentation on billing processes might receive negative ratings, not because of its quality, but as a vent for the user’s broader discontent. In this context, simplistic feedback mechanisms risk conflating user sentiment with the efficacy of documentation itself.

At Cloudflare, I witnessed this very issue across all of our billing documentation when the company was having prolonged issues with its billing systems. The billing documentation was already rated poorly by users before billing outages, but that was due to poor user sentiment about our billing policy. I know this firsthand from seeing the many angry customers in the billing support tickets.

So, what can companies do to ensure their feedback mechanisms yield meaningful insights? The answer lies in embracing a more nuanced approach that fosters genuine engagement and elicits thoughtful responses from users.

One such approach requires users to provide detailed feedback, including a certain number of words and their email address. While this might seem like a higher barrier to entry, it’s a strategy rooted in the principle of quality over quantity. By prompting users to articulate their thoughts and experiences, companies gain access to richer, more actionable feedback.

Here are several considerations to keep in mind when implementing such a feedback process:

Contextual Understanding: Recognize that many factors influence user feedback, including their current mood, prior experiences with the product, and broader perceptions of the company. By acknowledging this context, companies can better interpret feedback and discern genuine issues from transient frustrations.

Incentivize Participation: Encourage users to provide feedback by highlighting its importance in shaping the product experience. Consider offering incentives such as exclusive content or early access to new features to motivate engagement.

Transparency and Privacy: Be transparent about how user feedback is used and ensure that privacy concerns are addressed. Communicate how user data will be handled and reassure users that their feedback is valued and respected.

Iterative Improvement: Treat feedback as an iterative process, continuously refining documentation based on user input. Regularly review feedback trends and prioritize areas for improvement to ensure that documentation remains relevant and effective.

Empathy and Empowerment: Approach feedback with empathy, understanding that behind every comment is a user striving to accomplish a task or solve a problem. Empower users to contribute meaningfully to the improvement of documentation, fostering a sense of collaboration and shared ownership.

Feedback mechanisms on each document are great but, you may be wondering where to get deeper, more consistent insights and build relationships with customers and other teams. If you want to move beyond a simple feedback mechanism in each document, here are some areas where I found it valuable to cultivate documentation feedback while working at New Relic and Cloudflare:

The UX Research Team: Check in with your UX Research team so they know that you’d like to make some connections with customers to talk about the pros and cons of some of the documentation. The UX Research team can help you make connections with customers and can also provide great insights into which questions will elicit the most useful responses.

The Community: If you have someone who manages your company community site, they can help you identify who the most valuable contributors are so you can get lots of feedback on a specific document or a whole area of a company’s documentation. Plus, a good community manager can give you a sense of where the community struggles with the product the most.

Tech Writer Interviews: Making a habit of asking Technical Writing candidates what they think is and isn’t working for your documentation is not only a great way to gauge a candidate but a great way to get some advice about your documentation or identify problem areas you haven’t considered.

New Hires: Folks new to your company are looking to understand the product just like any customer. They have good motivation to prove themselves early after being hired and have fresh eyes that can spot documentation issues that veteran employees are accustomed to.

The Support Team: The support team can not only provide you guidance on where customers are struggling, but they can back that data with real numbers. When you can’t get access to a customer, a company’s support team makes a great proxy.

In conclusion, the decision to enable page feedback in product documentation is not merely a technical choice but a strategic one. By adopting a thoughtful feedback process that prioritizes depth over simplicity, companies can unlock invaluable insights, cultivate user trust, and ultimately deliver documentation that truly serves the needs of their audience. Also, documentation managers should make a habit of seeking deeper feedback in a variety of ways.