How to collect user feedback on your website without annoying anyone

Most websites collect feedback badly in one of two directions. Either there is nothing at all beyond a support email nobody writes to, or there is a survey that interrupts people mid-task and asks them to rate their experience from one to ten before they have had one.

Where to put it

A persistent button in a bottom corner, on every page. Bottom right is the convention; if a chat widget already lives there, use bottom left rather than stacking them.

The important word is every. Feedback links that live only on a contact page collect feedback from people motivated enough to go looking for a contact page, which is a narrow and unrepresentative group. The person who noticed something confusing on your pricing page will tell you if there is a button in front of them and will not if telling you requires navigation.

Using your own button instead

A floating button is not the only option and sometimes it is the wrong one. If your app already has a settled interface, putting “Send feedback” in your own menu is less intrusive and often gets used more, because it looks like part of the product rather than a bolted-on widget. Any decent tool lets you trigger the panel from your own element; in Voicebox that is a data attribute or one function call.

What to ask

As little as possible, in this order of value:

• The message. One free-text box. This is the entire point and everything else is metadata around it.
• A type. Idea, issue, praise, question. Four buttons, one tap, and it makes the inbox sortable without anyone writing a subject line.
• A rating, optionally. Useful for trend lines over months. Useless in isolation, and worth skipping entirely if you are not going to chart it.
• An email, optionally. The only way to reply. Optional is doing real work in that sentence.

Everything you add past this trades completions for structure. That is sometimes a good trade, but make it deliberately: a form with six required fields does not produce six times the insight, it produces a fraction of the submissions.

Attach the context yourself

Anything you can capture without asking is information you get for free and a question you do not have to make someone answer. Which page they were on, which plan they are on, how long they have been a customer.

The difference this makes is large. “This is confusing” is nearly useless. “This is confusing” attached to a specific page, from an account on their second day, is a finding about your onboarding.

When to ask

Passive collection, a button that waits, is the baseline and should always exist. Prompting is the multiplier, and it works when it follows a real moment: a long task finishing, an error being hit, someone succeeding at the thing your product is for.

Once. A prompt that appears after a meaningful moment reads as attentive. The same prompt on every page load reads as a pop-up, and people learn to dismiss it without reading, which costs you the attention permanently.

What happens after matters more than any of this

Collection is the easy half. The failure most teams actually hit is an inbox with four hundred messages nobody has read since March, which is worse than no feedback at all, because you are now making decisions while believing you have data.

Decide up front who reads it and how often, and prefer a system that groups messages by the underlying problem rather than making a human tag them. The next piece covers that part.

Say what you do with it

One line under the box is enough. People are more forthcoming when they know where their words are going, and if any part of your pipeline sends text to a model, that is worth stating plainly rather than burying in a policy nobody opens.

Common questions