Quantifying Feedback

One of the challenges companies face when they are developing a new product is incorporating user feedback into development. It’s often easy to get users to describe what they would like to see in a product, but when the suggestions number into the hundreds, and in Google’s case, the thousands, triaging the feedback becomes a nightmare.

This morning I was frustrated by Google Calendar’s colouring scheme. I can select a similars colours for calendars that are related, which is great, but for some strange reason the calendars I maintain are more pale than the calendars I subscribe to. That means visually my calendars are less important than other people’s calendars. Depending on the path you have chosen for your life, this is a problem. I decided to submit some feedback and came across this feedback page:

Partial screenshot of Google Calendar quanitifiable feedback page

While there was a option to suggest “Customize Google Calendar’s color scheme”, my feedback was more specific than this. But in a way it did allow me to express a problem which can be addressed by a redesign of the colour selection. It’s an interesting route to take when you are faced with an unmanageable amount of valuable feedback.