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How about explicitly inviting new user feedback?
Prompted by comments in this comment thread - I agree that it's often very difficult to get feedback from new users in the meta area of a community, especially one that has custom software on top of a particular culture. Relatively few people will go out of their way to raise their voices, and those who want to try, may either struggle to find the right space, worry about causing disruption, etc.
Guiding new users via systems like the current site tour seems to work pretty well. What if we also had an explicit callout in the UI for new users - maybe delayed a week or so after account creation - explicitly inviting them to share general impressions of the site?
To avoid clutter or the perception of redundancy, I imagine directing users to post in a separate category on the main Meta site, and perhaps starting them off with a mini-wizard asking them to indicate which Codidact sites they tried and whether they have feedback specific to those sites (as opposed to about the software or overall community).
1 answer
When collecting feedback, it helps to reduce barriers as much as possible. A common (and useful) technique is to have a little popup asking for a rating. Usually this is a Likert scale with a prompt such as:
I found the answer to my question.
1 Strongly disagree | 2 Disagree | 3 Neither agree nor disagree | 4 Agree | 5 Strongly agree
It doesn't have to be a popup necessarily, by the way. That's just an easy thing to add without impacting the rest of the site design. The details of the question and the response options aren't critical either. What matters is having a number that roughly measures the usefulness of the page that people can easily pick without overthinking it.
Tracking that data is somewhat useful, but when someone answers, the popup could prompt the user for more information in a freeform text field. It can also be helpful to get an email address to ask followup questions. People want to give feedback, but you gotta ease them into it sometimes. It's especially helpful to demonstrate that the site is improved based on that feedback, which creates a virtuous cycle.[1]
Even more valuable feedback (which can be hard to hear at times) comes from watching a user struggle with the site. Developers and designers make things that work for their own way of thinking, but new users rarely have the same mindset. So you gotta see the framework they come with and decide what you can change to make the site work for them without sacrificing critical functionality for established users.
Meta can be really useful too, but remember people who post here generally have gotten past the barriers new users face. The feedback Meta is likely to miss is from users who have visited a few times, but haven't been motivated to post. Note: people are motivated to post when they think they have something valuable to add. That's hard to do on an active Meta where a lot of other people clearly know more than you do. The key is communicating that feedback from the earlier stage matters too.
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Discourse excels at this, by the way. ↩︎
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