Past feedbacks, web interface, and buttons.
Fetch your past feedbacks history
It’s always been possible for users to fetch old feedbacks: you just had to go back into the history of the Direct Message thread with Captain Feedback bot into Slack. But things could get rather painful when feedback starts accumulating. There was no filtering options and both given and received feedbacks were mixed together. What if I have a sales call this afternoon and want to check these amazing pieces of feedback on deal closing that I received from our Head of Sales 4 months ago?
It’s finally possible to quickly fetch and review all the feedbacks you received from your teammates and the ones you gave them! Users have been requesting this feature for a while. We wanted to make it easier to access all this precious treasure of personalized constructive feedback in a glance of an eye.
Web-based interface
At Captain Feedback we love Slack. It is awesome to communicate effectively with humans (and bots) and get work done. Still, let’s admit it. When it’s time to navigate content, drill-down, and explore large sets of information, Slack’s conversational interface falls short. Humans are simply inherently wired to process information visually.
That’s why we are launching today a web dashboard integrated with your Captain Feedback account and history.
You can now easily navigate your old feedbacks and reflect back on some advice that your coworker gave you a while ago. Feedbacks are organized across “Delivered” and “Given” categories. You can quickly sort by date, teammate, context, and search information via keyword. Last but not least, you can sign up in seconds since we integrated Slack login which is both super convenient and very secure (using oAuth authentication process).
And for those who wants to extract this trove of personalized self-development advice, and store it somewhere or share it with trusted confidents, we added the option to extract this data in a CSV file.
Stay tuned. We have lots of cool ideas to make this web app a great and useful extension of Captain Feedback Slack bot.
Buttons to simplify navigation
The Slack team recently launched buttons (aka interactive messages). We played with at launch but wanted to wait for the right opportunity to integrate them in the Captain Feedback user flow. With the addition of the history feature to access and filter through old feedbacks, it made sense to add a main menu with buttons to guide user between available actions.
You will also notice that we added buttons here and there with the goal to improve the user experience flow for those who prefer clicking over typing. ;)
If you ask us, buttons are pretty cool. They are deceptively simple but quite powerful from an interaction design perspective. They solve a recurring navigation design problem that many users face with chatbots: “what should I say next?” or also “what options /actions are available to me?”. Until today, we’ve been solving this design challenge by keeping the instructions in our copy as simple as possible, and by adding some hints in italics to direct users towards possible response choices the bot was expecting and could process.
Another more technical approach would be to add a layer of Natural Language Processing (through a NLP-as-a-service such as Api.ai, Wit.ai, or Luis) to do the heavy lifting in triaging user input and categorizing it into output the bot can work with.
At Captain Feedback, we like to keep things simple stupid and avoid technology overkill. Buttons perfectly solve this interaction design problem in the most simple and intuitive way.
Dogfooding!
We are always interested in hearing how teams are using Captain Feedback and what we could add to serve our core objective: supporting teams who want to raise the bar, by facilitating transparency, peer-coaching, and self-development. Building healthy team habits such as open constructive feedback is a critical piece. But there is so much more to it and we have big plans to add them to Captain Feedback.
Come say hi in our community Slack team. We call it “The Tavern” because that’s where proper mariners go to hangout after a good day of sailing the tides of workplace dynamics. ;)
