This blog has moved to Medium

Subscribe via email


Have feedback on Google? Bring it!

Note – this post obviously only represents my personal opinion, and not of Google. Kittens will be killed if you think otherwise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now, that we have that out of the way, let me come to the main point. Feedback is important, and I don’t think we’re doing a good enough job getting and managing user feedback. Yeah, I’m starting to use “we” in this context, even though I’m a super fresh Noogler, I’m practicing!

I just remembered that a few years ago (about five minutes after I discovered User Voice), I found a User Voice feedback forum for Google. Over the years, a few people actually found it and voted up my #1 suggestion. Now that I’m a Googler, I might have some small ability to actually move things in Google, even if right now it’s mostly finding the right people to talk to, and asking them about stuff I care about.

So … if you have a feature suggestion or frustration relating to one of Google’s many products – feel free to post it at the feedback forum – I’ll try to do my best to promote these ideas internally.

6 Comments

  1. Yaron Naveh:

    If you can get this sorted out I’ll monitor your blog comments spam for a year:
    http://webservices20.blogspot.com/2011/05/anyone-else-having-problems-with-google.html

  2. dcasp3r:

    well this is good news that you’ve seen the problem from the outside and have a mind to do something about it if you can from the inside — i love Google but could never figure out why there’s such neglect of user feedback. the problem is borderline corporate negligence at this point and makes no sense. as a first pet peeve issue for me there are two:

    1. i left an employer who was using Google Apps and then had to do a factory reset on my droid when that google account was disabled — that is #epicfail someone’s asleep at the wheel on that one and i imagine at some point the apple fanboys will get wind of it

    2. need support for multiple Google Talk accounts in fact speaking of Google’s pitiful managing of user feedback, read through this whole post? i don’t think the survivors of oceanic flight 815 even felt this cut off http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4832

  3. Derrick Posit:

    My feedback

    1. Never heard of this suggestion form.

    2. Checked it out.

    3. It says I’m only allowed to make 10 suggestions at a time.

    4. It says if I want to make an 11th I have to decide which one I want to delete.

    5. So to use this system I can’t just make suggestions, I have to rank them and figure which are most important.

    6. That system has more to do with playing games than allowing for suggestions.

    7. Why bother really.

    8. Press the close button and move on, my 10 minutes thinking even about this was wasted.

  4. ripper234:

    @Derrick – obviously ranking is very important, not just sending out suggestions to thin air. User Voice forces you to think about what’s most important to you, and not just send out a gazillion suggestions that will spam and overload the developers. Can’t you find just a few issues that are most troubling to you?

  5. Martin:

    Awesome, there are many things that could be fixed with Google’s interfaces, it’s just hard to remember them now. Trying to report bugs before was always frustrating to find that users couldn’t actually do that at all.

    I’m bookmarking your link, and will use it to try to report problems in the future as they come up.

    Thanks

    @dcasp3r: Yes! There are so many problem with Gtalk. I use it a lot and like the concept, but there needs to be better options for fine-grained control of what will be the “active agent” and if maybe you want all the messages to be delivered no matter what.

  6. ripper234:

    @Yaron – from what I found there is a high priority bug open on this. I added your blog post to that bug’s comment trail … people seem to be working on it.

    Also, to future readers of this post – it’s not my intent to collect all feedback on this comment thread, because this will become unmanagable FAST. Please put your feedback on user voice, and vote for other people’s feedback if you think it’s worthy. I will still try to help any individual user that comments here, but my priority is getting organized RANKED feedback so I can showcase it to people inside and prioritize the tasks.