Wednesday, July 28, 2004

User Feedback...Good to Receive?

Sometimes I have a good old grumble at the feedback I receive for the company intranet (and not so often at the website feedback), but today, I was elated to receive an email from one of our CMS users in response to an upgrade email I had sent around. There were four elements to the upgrade, and the response went:

"1. good idea, 2. better idea 3. this is good too 4. this will make things easier"

Now according to this emailer, all we need to add is a wysiwyg spell-checker (in the pipeline) and he'll be happy as Larry.


My question from all this is as follows: should we be honest and say that it is "constructive" feedback (read "negative") that the IA/ID/UX practitioner should pay attention to, or should we say that the odd pat on the back is good for morale, and shows our attention to our users? Given that as Schiller said "Du Kannst nicht allen gefallen" (I think he said this - "You can't please everyone!"), when do you draw the line with a piece of feedback and say it's just not helpful (because it is too laudatory or unnecessarily critical)?

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