1. Ways that have worked

We have used buttons - once near the top of the homepage and another time in our global footer, titled "Help make our website easier to use." A lot of people click on it. We've used this for surveys, online card sorts, and are going to use it for Treejack in the next week or two. Within a couple of weeks of putting this button on our main website to go to a survey, we received 68 completed responses. The vast majority of people who opened the survey completed it. I think it was successful because we kept the questions short, simple, and optional. 

We also had a real basic pop-up appear when you'd go to our homepage, but it would only appear once, so would only be annoying for a second. We also only left it up for a couple of weeks. And there was a very simple, "No thanks" to close it. But we had a ton of people fill it out (hundreds). All it said was, "Tell us what you think. Complete a short survey to help us improve the library." 

2. Ways that haven't worked

We changed the button in the footer to direct people to our online card sort - we have had no one complete this. 13 people attempt it but abandon it. Lesson learned - it takes too long (we included too many cards) and people won't do it just out of their goodwill. So while they'll click the button, they'll see it's going to take more than a minute of their time and won't go through the effort.

Rebecca Blakiston
User Experience Librarian
University of Arizona Libraries
[log in to unmask]
(520) 307-2834

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Charlie Morris
Sent: Monday, June 02, 2014 11:39 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Online site feedback or usability surveys?

Hey Josh,

We are currently employing one of these at the moment to gather feedback on our new responsive look.  In my opinion it is unobtrusive (we haven't heard any complaints about it being obtrusive either) and we are getting some minimally useful responses (that's a low bar though!).  We made a way for the user to close the request for feedback message per session/visit, so as to make even less annoying.  And we kind of went back and forth on this
point: if a user dismisses the feedback request how long should that dismissal last?  We landed on per session, but we could have set it to a day or a week or whatever.

Anyway, you can take a look here:
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/

Also valuable in the feedback is what isn't said.  I have better peace of mind that there are no crucial problems or boulders in the user experience.

One last thing, we are recording user agent along with the form submissions just in case we needed to do some troubleshooting.

Hope that helps,
Charlie




On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 1:05 PM, Josh Wilson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Has anyone implemented an online feedback or usability form that you'd 
> consider successful? "Successful" as in, generated at least some 
> minimally useful responses while remaining unobtrusive to users?
>
> I'm being asked about getting such a thing going on our library and 
> digital collections sites. But I'm hesitant on the value. All the 
> examples of this kind of thing that I've seen (e.g. various flavors of 
> pop-up) or that have been suggested seem annoying, or will be ignored, 
> or will be annoying AND ignored.
>
> Ideally I'd like to hear about:
>
> 1. Ways of gathering online feedback that have worked 2. Ways of 
> gathering online feedback that have definitively NOT worked
>
> Thanks for your thoughts!
>
> Josh
>