In April, we opened up a brand-new product feedback website. A couple of weeks later, we found ourselves sitting on top of 1000 separate posts to that site. We're a couple of months into this, and we've received a lot of feedback from our customers.

I’m one of the people who goes through that feedback. My goals are probably different than most of the others who go through it. Each of the individual apps (Word, PowerPoint, etc) has someone on the team who goes through the feedback for their app: looking at bug reports, noting feature requests, etc. I try to look at that feedback and see trends, identify opportunities, determine where we’re not meeting our customers’ needs.

Last week, I analysed some of the product feedback and provided recommendations to the PM for an improvement that we could make to address a common discoverability issue. ‘Discoverability’ refers to how easy it is to find a particular function. If you can’t find a function in an app, it’s not discoverable. What good is it for us to spend the time to add a feature if no-one can use it because they can’t find it? The next version should address that concern, and some of our users will be able to find a function that they thought that we didn’t provide.

Earlier today, I contacted one of our UA (user assistance) people to see if she thought that we could write up an article to discuss a common question that I noticed in the product feedback. We met this afternoon about it, and hopefully you’ll see something on Mactopia in the near future.

The benefit of sending us feedback is that we’re listening, and we’re taking action on it. Some of those actions you’ll see sooner because we can implement them pretty quickly. Some of them, you’ll see in a future version of an app. If you include contact information in your feedback, we might contact you to ask for more information if we need it. But you’re not just shouting into the void: we’re listening, and (more importantly) we’re doing something about it.