How important is the "Feedback" feature of your public site?

I found something that's not right about formatting when trying to compose a gmail today. Been the constructive person I am, I want to report to google team of the problem, but to my surprise I can't find they "submit a bug" link! I first bottom of the page, no links. Then looked under Help Center, found a link to "Common Issues", but it's not listed there. There is a suggestion link, but I am not suggesting a "make-a-billion-dollar-for-me" ideas, I have a bug to report!. So coming back under "Known Issues", nothing listed there, but there is a link "Don't see your issue listed above?" clicked and then "check out our Troubleshooter ", now what? nothing listed under those links! It's not until a co-worker of mine told me that under this very page, if you click "Registration & Invitations", then you will see "I'd like to report a new issue"!!!!

OMG.... all that to get to http://mail.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=troubleshooter.cs...

This is from the giant google of user friendly centric company! What happen there? I hope someone here will tell me that, No Z, you missed here.

So the question is how important is your public webapp to let user to get feedback to you? and what steps did you tried to make sure you get user's opinion heard?

Thanks,
-Zemian Deng

Views: 56

▶ Reply to This

Happy 10th year, JCertif!

Notes

Welcome to Codetown!

Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.

When you create a profile for yourself you get a personal page automatically. That's where you can be creative and do your own thing. People who want to get to know you will click on your name or picture and…
Continue

Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.

Looking for Jobs or Staff?

Check out the Codetown Jobs group.

 

Enjoy the site? Support Codetown with your donation.



InfoQ Reading List

Google Researchers Propose Bayesian Teaching Method for Large Language Models

Google Research has proposed a training method that teaches large language models to approximate Bayesian reasoning by learning from the predictions of an optimal Bayesian system. The approach focuses on improving how models update beliefs as they receive new information during multi-step interactions.

By Daniel Dominguez

Cloudflare Introduces Support for ASPA, an Emerging Internet Routing Security Standard

Cloudflare recently announced support for ASPA (Autonomous System Provider Authorization). The new cryptographic standard helps make Internet routing safer by verifying the path data takes across networks to reach its destination and preventing traffic from traversing unreliable or untrusted networks.

By Renato Losio

DoorDash Builds LLM Conversation Simulator to Test Customer Support Chatbots at Scale

DoorDash engineers built a simulation and evaluation flywheel to test large language model customer support chatbots at scale. The system generates multi-turn synthetic conversations using historical transcripts and backend mocks, evaluates outcomes with an LLM-as-judge framework, and enables rapid iteration on prompts, context, and system design before production deployment.

By Leela Kumili

Netflix Uncovers Kernel-Level Bottlenecks While Scaling Containers on Modern CPUs

Engineers at Netflix have uncovered deep performance bottlenecks in container scaling that trace not to Kubernetes or containerd alone, but into the CPU architecture and Linux kernel itself.

By Craig Risi

Presentation: Beyond the Code: Hiring for Cultural Alignment

Alicia Collymore discusses the critical role of cultural alignment in building high-performing engineering teams. She explains how to move beyond "vibes" by identifying specific attributes in company values and assessing them during coding challenges and system design sessions. She shares practical advice on using interview debriefs, assessment criteria, and "culture add" to drive growth.

By Alicia Collymore

© 2026   Created by Michael Levin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service