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Closing the feedback loop

Photo by MrHayata



My recent post on intranet profiles elicited a comment from Adriana Beal of 2wtx consulting.

Out of that I accepted her invitation to provide 2wtx's user centered design blog "It's Broken" with a guest post. Adriana originally asked me to talk about the difference a well designed intranet could make, having looked at "It's Broken" and taken a stab at the audience I wrote about closing the Intranet feedback loop.

This is a topic that I've been wrestling with recently. Many of the requests that come across my desk have great planning, lofty goals and real organisational benefits but no feedback mechanism. No way to ensure, that if the solution isn't quite right, that the users of the system have some way of initiating improvements.

Take search for example - I've done quite a lot of work trying to improve search by analysing the log files I've got our search engine to create. I've got best bets, I look at the top 50 / 100 search terms I know who is searching for what, I even have a rough way of tracking an individual users search experience from first search through subsequent searches to the results pages that the users visits.
The only definitive knowledge I can get from this analysis is :
  • I know when staff have done a search and got NO results.
In which case I contact them via email and ask them to reply with where they found the solution so I can update best bets. Staff love it but it still doesn't help me with the other outcomes of search:
  • Did the person find what they were looking for ?
  • Did the person have a disaster ? (Find what they thought was correct but was actually wrong)
  • Did the person get lots of results but no answer ?
Obviously the 'Was this page useful to you - Yes/No/Comment' is how most organisations close this loop. To my mind this isn't good enough. Firstly it relies on staff clicking the Yes / No / Comment button on every page of results they visit, I don't do it why should anyone else.

[Do any of you dear readers have stats on how often staff actually do this ?]

and it still wouldn't capture the Disaster situation I mention above.

To get back to my original point of this post, keep trying to build positive feedback loops into your intranets. Unless we consider it and work towards this goal it won't happen.

Serendipitously RichardDenniston posted this on twitter today

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RichardDennison: "Feedback is useful to us but we regret we will be unable to respond to any individual who provides feedback" - from intranet feedback page!


Adriana and her team at www.2wtx.com help large organisations with business analysis consulting and small businesses with web presence strategy. They're based in NYC, Pittsburgh (PA) and Charlotte (NC). And no they don't pay me to mention them but I really like their online presence, obvious professional skills and Adriana's philanthropic work .

Comments

Adriana B. said…
Nice of you to mention our website and work here, Dorje!

We look forward to collaborating more in the future, and are pleased that your blog post is being well received, like in this article in Italian about Intranets 2.0:

http://www.intranetmanagement.it/2009/06/il-decalogo-della-intranet-2-0/

(In item 5 the author talks about feedback and recommends DorjeM's article as a good reference for the importance of closing the loop with the Intranet team.)
June 26, 2009 at 3:46 AM
Dorje McKinnon said…
Thanks Adriana ,

For those of you looking for a translation of Giacomo Mason's post, which is a very good outline of the key aspects of a 2.0 strategy within an organisation, an auto translation to English is here
June 26, 2009 at 9:06 AM
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