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by gigel82 1621 days ago
I've heard the tool's internal frontend (OCV) is equally frustrating to use by employees; and because of the huge amount of useless replies (that the author mentioned) in most teams it's only used for sentiment analysis on keywords ('people generally hate/love the new FooBar feature').

A friend working for MS in Office mentioned they're actually trying to gather customer feedback out of the random bottomless well there, but slim pickings.
2 comments
ack_complete 1621 days ago
From the perspective of someone not at Microsoft, it feels like part of the reason it's such a mess is because it's obviously really badly curated, to the point that the Feedback Hub app encourages it. Older versions of the Feedback Hub had categorization on the left so you would naturally browse into a category, but then they changed it to not very visible drop-downs and auto-suggested categories. The result is feedback goes to random categories and is never moved to the correct ones, nor is there a way to report miscategorized feedback. There is also still old feedback for bugs that were fixed in the Windows 10 pre-RTM previews, and even some that are just complete gibberish random characters.

Also, at one point they decided that upvoting problems would no longer be allowed. Instead, you were supposed to file your own report with your own logs. Good intention, except that it meant that everyone either filed their bugs as suggestions instead, or flooded the category with tons of dupes of the same bug.

Running a feedback system is hard, and there's value in having a feedback path that's more accessible to users than a bug database. However, Feedback Hub feels like users dumping feedback into a landfill, and the team then trying to sift through that landfill.

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donmcronald 1621 days ago
I wonder if they’d get better replies if it didn’t seem like an effort to silo feedback into a tool they control so they can ignore it and keep negative feedback that gains traction out of the spotlight.

Based on my experience I call it the “Fuck-Off Hub” because that’s where they send you so you can feel like you’re submitting feedback, but they really just want you to fuck off and stop bugging them. It’s like whispering into the Grand Canyon. No one that matters is ever going to hear your feedback, so why bother?

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