We find customer feedback quite delicious at MSN Search.  To help the team digest the massive flow of feedback we receive, we designed a tagging and viewing system inspired by the faceted browsing system, Flamenco, developed at UC Berkeley. We’re very happy to have addressed our top feature request in the latest release – yellow page results, called out in the image below as “ypResults” with the introduction of local search.

 

Tagging is particularly appropriate for feedback as users rarely talk just about one issue or neatly constrain their comments to a single feature team. In the picture above, we’ve masked the actual issue names with fruits, vegetables, and trees – we’re not trying to air our dirty laundry! It shows just one view of the feedback, which segments by the type of issue.  User raised issues are dealt with in every stage of development, while feature requests feed into planning, and usability sits somewhere in between.  Another essential set of views slices this data by the feature. This allows our image team to see requests for larger images without hearing about Search Builder discovery issues.

 

Use the “help us improve” links on every page. We’re listening (and tagging).

 

Andy Edmonds, Relevance Measurement PM