It would be nice if we could just say “give us feedback” and our customers could just turn on the faucet and dump out all of their concerns and experiences and ideas. But that’s not the way our brains work.
Let me illustrate.
Quick, without Googling, what were the venues for the last 4 Summer Olympics?
If you’re like me, a neat list of 4 cities did not immediately pop into your head. In fact, even though I’m a pretty die-hard Olympics-watching fan, my brain is struggling to remember anything before Beijing.

But what about if I asked the question in this way?
From the list below, pick the venues for the last 4 Summer Olympics:
- Seoul
- Beijing
- Los Angeles
- Montreal
- Athens
- Rio de Janeiro
- Sydney
- Tokyo
- Johannesburg
- Atlanta
Easier this time, right? Beijing, Athens, Sydney, Atlanta.
That’s an illustration of recall vs. recognition in human memory.
Recall memory involves delving into your brain, looking for specific pieces of information, finding them, confirming that they are the information you wanted, and then putting them to use.
Recognition skips the first three steps. You are somehow prompted with the specific pieces of information, then all you have to do is confirm that they are correct and put them to use.
In both cases, the information is stored somewhere in your brain. If I had never heard of the Olympics, I wouldn’t be able to pick the correct cities out of a list – all of the list items would’ve been similarly meaningless to me.
Why is this important?
As you might have guessed, recall memory is harder. It’s legitimately harder for people to answer a question that doesn’t provide any contextual prompts.
If I used your product on Monday, and you email me on Wednesday saying “Any feedback?”, I’m likely to draw a blank. Not because I don’t care about you, not because I’m a “stupid user”, but because I’ve got no context to use to dig into my recall memory.
Recall memory is like asking your brain to do push-ups. Some people can’t do many or any pushups; others can, but we’d rather procrastinate and get around to it later.
So how do I ask for feedback in a “brain-friendly” way?
Use recognition.
Instead of asking “what should we build next?“, ask “which of these new features [list] would be most helpful to you, and why?” (Not only is this “brain-friendly”, it’s also “product manager-friendly”, allowing you to guide their feedback in alignment with your long-term product vision. There’s no value in letting people ask for faster horses over and over again if you’re building Model Ts.)
If you suspect a specific page is confusing, don’t ask “what about the page was confusing?”, show them a picture of the page and let them point to the confusing parts.
Give customers a sentiment and allow them to agree (or disagree) and elaborate. For example, “some customers felt this workflow was confusing – why do you think that is?”
Use immediacy.
If you ask a question while the customer is using your site, there’s nothing to remember – they just did, or are still doing, the thing you’re asking about.
In my experience, immediacy cancels out one of the biggest complaints I hear about customer feedback: “it’s useless because it’s all extremes, 1 star or 5 stars!” This makes perfect “brain sense” – after you’ve completed an action or experience and time has passed, your memory becomes distorted towards the elements that left you with the biggest emotional impact – whether that’s joy at a gorgeous interface, or (more likely) fury at a confusing workflow.
But while your customer is experiencing something, they’re going through a series of impressions: Ooh, nice refresh! Hmm, I don’t understand that sentence. Oh good, this will do exactly what I wanted. Wait, did that charge my credit card or not? I wish this workflow was more straightforward. This will make my life easier. How do I undo what I just did? Oh no! Oh, phew, I guess it’s okay.
Wouldn’t you rather overhear that entire stream of impressions vs. a 3-star rating or “yeah, I kind of like your site”?
Use interactivity.
It’s not always possible (and sometimes downright intrusive) to get customer feedback while they’re in the middle of trying to get something done.
The next best method is to be interactive. In-person, phone, or IM chat interviews allow you to provide context and prompts to make it easier for your customer to give you feedback. You can describe a feature “do you remember using the ‘sort and select’ feature? Let me describe it. OK, now tell me about how you used it…” and then it’s far easier for the customer to provide valuable feedback.
(While this method is primarily qualitative, you can ask for 1-5 ratings on the phone just as easily as in a survey. Even better, because you can confirm that the customer really understands what they’re rating instead of just picking “3″ because they don’t remember what that feature was.)
Use pictures.
There are times when you need more responses than you can scalably get through interviews. In those situations, illustrate! Before asking a question, include a screenshot or even a quick video, to remind customers what they’re responding to.
Unfortunately, neither SurveyMonkey nor Wufoo nor Google Forms support embedding images in between questions by default, so this is less easy than it should be. UserTesting.com is one option, or you can hack something together with multiple Wufoo or Google Forms pages and stick your own images in between.
What’s your biggest obstacle to getting customer feedback?
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