Gathering user feedback in GitLab: Discovery
Problem to solve
User feedback is very important for understanding user needs and whether or not existing features are meeting their needs. At GitLab, we obtain this feedback through engaging with users through a variety of channels - but we don't have the ability to conditionally ask users for feedback inside the product.
General feedback is great, but GitLab is a wide product - we want to ask users about their experiences with specific categories of the product as they're using them.
I've heard this need from a large customer, who would love a better mechanism for capturing internal feedback in their projects. A customer has a group for each individual, and many projects nested within each group. Individuals maintain a group and are free to look at someone else's projects; if they check them out and want to provide some type of feedback to the project maintainer, they should be able to.
Another use case is for public projects/groups in GitLab.com; instead of relying entirely on issues, it'd be a nice feature to be able to solicit certain types of feedback from observers.
Further details
We explored the idea of integrating a user feedback tool into GitLab in ux-research#73 (closed), but we couldn't find anything that was a good fit for our needs.
A few needs come to mind:
- I want to be able to ask a user a custom question (or series of questions) when they're viewing something specific.
- I want their responses to be aggregated somewhere (an issue?), including the page they submitted the feedback on.
- Then, I want to be able to set conditions for the question to appear (e.g. the user just took an action, or the user belongs to a specific group/role).
Opt-in to these feedback prompts by default, but a user should be able to easily opt-out of these questions forever.
Proposal
- Create a feedback component we can present to users we want to get feedback from.
- It should present the user with a single free response question. I can submit, dismiss, or opt out of these questions forever.
- An admin should be able to configure this component to appear on a specific page in a Polls section.
- An admin should be able to configure the question the component is asking. The question is always free response, I can only change the label.
- On submitting the question, we create an issue to record the response.
- Admin should be able to set the project that responses appear in.
Configuring in admin panel
Presentation when triggered
What does success look like, and how can we measure that?
TBD
Links / references
- https://www.pendo.io/ from Daniel, great tool