4 ms·

> love to see the topic of user feedback on Hacker News I'm also very interested in the topic, but in a slightly different domain. I'm on a mission to get "was

> love to see the topic of user feedback on Hacker News I'm also very interested in the topic, but in a slightly different domain. I'm on a mission to get "was this page helpful?" feedback widgets on all technical documentation across the web. Recently I just helped the Kubernetes folks [1] add it to their docs site. One of my high-level goals is to get the docs community to aggregate all of this data in order to benchmark typical ratings for common types of documents. E.g. what's the typical rating for a tutorial? I also want us to start actively experimenting in order to validate what kinds of changes lead to meaningful improvements in documentation. E.g. adding examples to conceptual overviews improves the rating by 5% (not real numbers). Find me on the interwebz if you'd like help implementing one of these systems in your docs, or want to join this project. [1] https://github.com/kubernetes/website/pull/11037 https://github.com/kubernetes/website/pull/11037

flukus 8y ago
I've noticed MS seem to use this to improve their developer documentation, a few pages I've rated poorly have been improved over the years. Annoyingly the same company has "would you like to do a survey" popups all over their other sites a few seconds after you load the page, at least let me read the content first so I can give half informed feedback.
- kaycebasques 8y ago
  Yes, as a general PSA for the HN community, if you see a "was this page helpful?" widget on a developer doc, the team probably really does use that data in order to triage what docs need updating. So if you don't usually interact with those widgets, you might consider trying it. In particularly, if you rate a doc as unhelpful, and they give you a chance to provide freeform feedback, that is usually the most helpful information. Otherwise we have to guess at why a doc is getting a bad rating.

flukus 8y ago

I've noticed MS seem to use this to improve their developer documentation, a few pages I've rated poorly have been improved over the years. Annoyingly the same company has "would you like to do a survey" popups all over their other sites a few seconds after you load the page, at least let me read the content first so I can give half informed feedback.

kaycebasques 8y ago
Yes, as a general PSA for the HN community, if you see a "was this page helpful?" widget on a developer doc, the team probably really does use that data in order to triage what docs need updating. So if you don't usually interact with those widgets, you might consider trying it. In particularly, if you rate a doc as unhelpful, and they give you a chance to provide freeform feedback, that is usually the most helpful information. Otherwise we have to guess at why a doc is getting a bad rating.