UserVoice, Power of Voting Applied to Feature Requests

Few months age  we have started to use UserVoice at our software team. This online tool is a customer feedback forum with voting functionality. As they describe it themselves it adds structure to feedback and reduces the overhead of an honest dialog with users. And I agree – some smart features make this simple forum solution very powerful for those who work on software products.

What makes this tool very powerful is the voting functionality. Every user has 10 votes he can assign to any available feature requests or to new ones. Simple. This makes user think about what is most important for him and not to write generic comments into the forum.

Initial idea for us was to use UserVoice as a feedback engine for our website visitors and application users. We expected to get general comments, like you get on blog posts or news announcements. Something like: “wow, your tool is gr8″, “waste of time”, “where can I find more info on…”. What has surprised us is that structure of the UserVoice forum made users to submit feature requests instead of expected general feedback. We have got request like “Integration with JIRA” (done), “create free plan for small teams” (done), “Special functionality for Open Source projects” (in progress). All of those were feature requests.

To UserVoice team I wanted to give thumbs up, and request one change. I think, your feedback widget is wrong. It doesn’t unleash the power of the tool as it suggest your solution is to give unstructured feedback. I would expect default widget to be “Suggest New Feature” or “Vote for Next Feature”. This would differentiate you from similar user community tool GetSatisfaction, which I hope to cover in one of the future posts

To conclude, voting functionality of UserVoice makes it well suited to engage user community to submit feature requests and gives each of your users a chance to influence product development. Don’t forget to try it “at home”.

Advertisement