How we use page feedback

Why page feedback data is important and how we use it to create helpful content.

Page feedback is a great way of gathering people’s thoughts and feelings after viewing our content. They may have been looking for specific information or trying to find an answer to a question. Page feedback lets us know if our content has helped someone do their task or solve a problem. It gives users of our website a voice to express their opinions and make suggestions for changes.

The feedback allows us to:

• better understand a problem.
• see our content through the user’s eyes.
• find ways to improve our work

How do we collect page feedback?

One way we collect feedback on our information and advice pages is through a pop-up survey. This lets us collect data at the point in the user’s journey where they are searching for answers or more information. They can say if they found a page helpful, and then tell us more in a short survey.

The survey includes questions like:

• What were you looking for?
• Why was the information helpful or not helpful?
• Is there anything we can do to improve this information?

Users can also choose to get a call back from Scope’s helpline as part of the survey.

We check our page feedback every weekday and do a review at the end of the month. This allows us to prioritise problems and see patterns in data.

Reviewing feedback daily

We review feedback every weekday, and our action depends on the topic or comments:

• We store feedback comments in different folders and include them in our page rating statistics.
• If there is a problem that needs to be addressed immediately, such as a broken link, we check and fix this.
• If someone tells us that content is incorrect, we send the page to a subject expert to review the information.
• We check for safeguarding concerns, and act on these using the relevant safeguarding procedures.

Reviewing feedback monthly

Information we are missing or ‘sniffs’

Sometimes feedback tells us that information is missing. We like to call this feedback a ‘sniff.’ This is feedback that suggests a user was looking for a piece of information and could not find it.

This data is valuable as it shows us what we don’t know. It directs us towards what we need to research. When we receive feedback like this, we add it to our ‘sniffs’ column at the start of our Kanban workflow. We use sniffs in our page annual data reports. Data reports review page statistics for the year, and sniffs can direct us towards improvements.

We can justify the need for more information by reviewing the scope of the user story and search data. Once we validate the need, we can add the task to our workflow. We may need to add more information to the page, or, if there is enough evidence, create a new page.

Insights into real-life experiences

Some of the feedback that we receive gives us an insight into the life of a disabled person. This is often longer text which details a problem.

This qualitative data can help us to:

• contextualise problems by telling us how the user arrived at an issue and the circumstances around the pain point.
• understand emotions in different situations. This helps us determine the severity of the problem and guides us when choosing the tone for information.
• see how issues interlink and how we could connect our information
• understand a user’s priority in a certain scenario and the problem they need to resolve first.

We tag insights with the different categories or keywords it covers in Airtable. This makes it easier to find the information later, or to cross-reference themes.

We use these insights when creating user stories. They help us see a bigger picture around a problem so that we can decide what kind of information a disabled person needs.

We ensure that people have provided permission to store this data and we remove all identifiable details before recording insights.

Sharing monthly themes or patterns

We review page feedback at the end of the month. If there are any patterns or themes, we write a summary. This includes statistics for the month such as:

• how many pieces of feedback we received
• how much feedback was positive or negative
• how many people found what they were looking for

We also outline any patterns in the data, including common topics that people are looking for.

We share this document with colleagues. This allows us to communicate our progress and keep a record of trends.

What’s next

On our page feedback survey, we ask the question ‘What will you do next?’

We want to find ways we can use this data to improve our content. We also want to explore how we can encourage users to complete the action they plan to do.

Conclusion

Our page feedback survey lets us collect data on:

• what people think about our content
• what they are trying to do

We can use this data to guide research, develop user stories and improve our content. It gives our users a voice and helps us to create information that meets their needs.