Seems like I have been on a kick to garner user feedback from my visitors. I recently installed the Skribit widget to help in that regard, but I found something even better than that, UserVoice. UserVoice helps you to obtain customer feedback in a clean and professional manner.

A few things I didn’t like about the Skribit widget is that it takes up space, and for you to see the entire functionality, my sidebar needs to be a larger width than what it is today. I can’t really change the width without a cascade of issues, so I was forced to decide between reducing the amount of visible area or find a new place for it where there is plenty of width. Obviously I decided to reduce the viewing area and just live with it. I wasn’t happy about that at all though. UserVoice doesn’t come with those issues.

UserVoice To The Rescue

UserVoice is different. It doesn’t require any space other than the little Feedback tab you can see on the right hand side of the screen. Clicking that will pop open a window where you can type in your email address and a comment. The comments are meant to be a bug, a feature request, a blog post idea or even a generic question you want to fire my way. Hell, it could be whatever you want as long as you’re not trying to sell me something.

Another feature that helped sell me on UserVoice is when you establish your account with UserVoice, you can set up a landing page. You are able to do some limited skinning of the landing page, like provide a logo, customize some of the text and so on. It’s pretty minimal but functional.

It’s also from the landing page that you can elaborate on the question or idea, and also vote on other ideas or suggestions that you agree with or want to see something happen with. All in all, it feels better than the other options, so I have once again switched up on everyone in favor of a better tool.

Installation

Another thing I liked was the ease of installation. A simple script placed before your closing tag is all it takes. With Blogger, you could easily add a new JavaScript/HTML widget to the footer of you template to install it should you want to. Same is true for WordPress or any other blog system that allows you to install custom scripts.

Sub-Domain Your UserVoice Profile

Finally, as if this service couldn’t get any better, you can also create a sub-domain for your profile page on UserVoice. For those that don’t know what this means, it is simply a way for me to include my UserVoice profile page under the waynejohn.com domain. If you navigate to feedback.waynejohn.com, you’ll see that this page is actually my UserVoice profile page. ‘Feedback’ is my sub-domain in this case.

They provide instruction on how this is accomplished, and if you are able to modify your own DNS entries then you should be able to as well.

Conclusion

I’m rolling with UserVoice from here forward, and if you need to get feedback from your users, this is probably the best route I’ve seen outside of some custom, business specific application.

I’ve migrated the existing Skribit suggestions into the UserVoice application and will be working to get those suggestions answered post-haste. I said that I may ditch the Skribit widget if things don’t take off. Well, things crashed for Skribit as far as being on my site any longer. UserVoice is something that I don’t mind keeping up, even if it’s not used that much. The ‘out of the way’ approach is easier to deal with and accept if people don’t use it that much. It’s another means of giving my readers a way to communicate to me, and that is all I want.

If you have some ideas on how to improve UserVoice itself, UserVoice is eating its own dog food and has established a feedback forum for suggestions on how to improve the widget and service.

I hope you find as much value to this application as I have so far. As always, I value your opinions and suggestions, so keep them coming!