Campuswire’s Secret Weapon: User Feedback
Here at Campuswire HQ, we’re obsessed with professor and student feedback.
We talk about it in every meeting, use it to gauge our progress, trust it to let us know what we need to improve, and rely on it to decide which new features to build. Really, it’s the foundation of our work.
We’re always very intentional about thanking our users each time they provide us feedback and asking them again and again to keep us in the loop on feature ideas, bug reports, and any suggestions they have for us — sorry if you’ve heard this before, but we’re going to keep asking :)
We use feedback as a guide: professors tell us about the problems they’re trying to solve in their courses and about the features they’d like to have. We listen closely and then think carefully about how we can best fit a feature idea into our vision, design, and roadmap.
Sometimes, the idea is a perfect fit, and we get to work right away. Often, the feature suggestion is a great one but we need to spend some time tweaking and refining it before it can be implemented. Other times, the need itself is one we hadn’t considered, and we do our own first-principles brainstorming to design a solution.
In return for all of the feedback we get from professors and students, we think it’s vital that we’re equally responsive and transparent. To that end, we try to provide the most accurate updates possible on feature release dates and our progress as a company as well as providing immediate support and updates as soon as new features (especially ones users have requested!) are released.
But, we also think it’s super important that our professors, TAs, and students (the ones generating all that feedback to help us improve!) have a chance to get a peek behind the Campuswire curtain to see how feedback really drives what we build.
So, from initial idea to final product on Campuswire itself, here’s a look at how three pieces of feedback quickly became part of the conversation at HQ and part of Campuswire itself.
Example #1A
Giving professors edit rights over student questions
Released 1/7/19
We’d planned for nearly a year to give professors the ability to edit a student’s question (all Campuswire users have always had the ability to edit their own posts — this feature would allow a professor to edit their students’ questions).
But, we’d held off on implementing this functionality because we weren’t 100% sure that it was something our users really wanted. Part of our vision at Campuswire is to take work off the plates of professors and to allow students to collaborate and ask questions in a space that feels as much their own as the communication tools they use in everyday life. Naturally, allowing professors to edit their content might cut somewhat against this vision — but that’s why we listen carefully to feedback!
What we quickly realized was that professors didn’t want edit rights over student posts to change the nature of their questions or to impede collaboration. The problem was simply that their students were making lots of careless errors that were simple to fix via a quick professor edit that would prevent any incorrect info or misplaced posts from being viewed by too many students.
We’d also heard from several students and TAs that they were noticing too many posts popping up in an incorrect category of with a small (but important!) typo or error in a formula. In these cases, it made lots of sense for us to allow professors to jump in and remedy these issues, especially because it was clear that student didn’t have any qualms about allowing this if it improved the quality and organization of their Class Feed.
(We’ve always allowed professors to make a post “Private” or to manually delete a post, but we wanted to make sure that no student questions/content had to be removed just because of a silly typo or misunderstanding.)
This is why feedback that points to a concrete use case is so important to us and why we’ll always ask users to explain to us specifically how they’d like to use a suggested feature. When we understand exactly how it fits into a class workflow and learning process, we’ll know if it fits into our vision for Campuswire.
In this case, Post Editing was already on our roadmap but we hadn’t quite decided how high of a priority it really was for users. Then, as soon as we started hearing from professors why they wanted it, everything clicked.
The beauty of our feedback process is that when professor feedback aligns with an idea we’ve already placed on our roadmap, it helps us confirm that we’re on the right track and allows us to immediately jump into build mode. In fact, we implemented this feature from start to finish over a single weekend!
(Sometimes it’ll take us just a weekend to incorporate your feedback into the platform and sometimes it’ll take us a couple months, but we promise we’re listening!)
The final product:
Example #1B
Giving professors edit rights over student answers
Released 2/11/19
The ability for professors to edit student answers after they’ve been posted had been a subject of debate at HQ for a couple of months. (Like #1A, it was something we had considered but weren’t sure about.)
On one hand, we’re all for professor customization. On the other, we knew that there might be pitfalls associated with allowing posted answers to be edited after the fact — professors run the risk of frustrating or confusing students if they edit their answers and there are potential issues associated with answers being altered after a conversation has already begun.
Additionally, we designed Campuswire to include multiple answers, unlike other forums that only allow one answer. Allowing for answers to be edited might mitigate one of our most useful, distinguishing features (of course, we still support multiple answers!).
So, professor editing of student answers wasn’t something that we had necessarily planned to build. But, we had to listen to our users!
In addition to receiving lots of strong support on our Canny page (where we track and rank feature requests), we started hearing regular requests for answer editing from professors through Intercom (our help feature) and during in-person meetings.
(We listen to feedback anyway we can get it — tweets, texts, Intercom, Canny posts, calls, and emails all work for us!)
In cases like this, there comes a point where professor demand is so vocal and consistent that we’re 100% convinced that the need is serious and pressing, even if it wasn’t a need that we had anticipated. We want to build anything that professors want as long as it’s actually beneficial to the student experience. Here, we were convinced that the use case professors were articulating would help keep the Class Feed better organized and provide more accurate answers — those are both great reasons for us to build a new feature!
When professors can point to a specific and recurring use case (sound familiar??) in which they need a certain feature or a case in which the lack of a feature is presenting an obstacle, we’re far more likely to be able to quickly build the ideal solution. As evident from the ^above feedback,^ there was a consistent reason why professors wanted to edit student answers.
So, we decided that we could give professors the functionality they wanted in a form that fit our vision. Professor editing of answers is happening relatively rarely on Campuswire, and we’re still seeing plenty of debates and conversations sparked by multiple, high-quality student answers — that’s what we want!
After all, our goal is to build a tool that fits the needs professors and students, not to tell them what they may or may not need. When professors tell us they need something, we’ll build it :)
The final product:
Example #3
Revealing the sender of an anonymous message
Released 2/11/19
This piece of feedback popped up just one time, which goes to show how attentively we listen to even one-off suggestions.
During an in-person meeting with two of our professors at Cornell in mid-January, we spent over an hour diving deep into how Campuswire handles anonymity, specifically anonymous messaging.
In addition to suggesting that we allow students to reset their pseudonyms periodically (another great idea that’s in progress!), they pointed out that it would be really useful if professors could see a students identity even if they were sending an anonymous message.
(This applies only to cases where professors have anonymity set on “Anonymous Only to Students” — this allows professors to see who’s created a post while helping students feel comfortable asking from help if they’d rather not be visible to all their peers.)
Initially, this means that students could send messages in discussions anonymously but that professors couldn’t see their identity, posing a challenge if professors wanted to offer that student more personalized help.
(Because this applies only to classes where the anonymity level is “Anonymous Only to Students,” we’re not revealing the ID of a user who thought they’d be anonymous — students already know that professors can see their real ID when they post anonymously in their class.)
What’s exciting about this type of feedback (in addition to pointing out a tiny piece of functionality that we had missed) is that it shows how thoroughly professors are thinking through how they’ll use Campuswire. They need us to be equipped for even the most specific use case so that they can help their students, and we’re always thrilled when a professor points out a small feature that might make a big difference in their teaching practice and their ability to support students.
The final product:
So, that was a really exhaustive — or tedious ;) — look at how we listen to, think about, and act on feedback here at Campuswire HQ. Our goal is not only to make sure that we’re building the most powerful course communication platform via that feedback but also to ensure that our users (professors, TAs, and students) know just how vital their ideas and suggestions are to our work — keep the feedback coming!
All the best,
The Campuswire Team
