

Now you lost me - mgronhol
http://www.krista.cc/posts/56

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mathijs
I like the reasoning behind this and I really welcome the simplicity of giving
feedback, but the way it is implemented here does not really make things
clearer. The link makes me think I'll get a simplified summary of the
paragraph, instantly. It's not clear that it sends an email to the writer.

Also, the writer will never know if a feedback-email comes from a genuinely
confused reader or from someone like me who simply though 'what does this
button do?'.

A solution would be to show a message after clicking the link, saying
something like 'thank you for your feedback, we've send an email to the
writer' together with a Cancel button.

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jkbr
I find feedback mechanisms that allow readers to react to individual parts of
text to be useful, especially when the text is of a technical nature.

What I dislike about this particular implementation is the UI: You don't know
what happens when you click the button until you have actually clicked it (the
same problem has for example the 'kudos' widget on Svbtle[0]). Also the button
is slightly obtrusive. Something more subtle with an explanation on hover or a
confirmation dialog would IMO do a better job.

A good example of something similar is (the now obsolete) Django Book[1] where
people can comment on any paragraph.

[0] e.g. <http://500hats.com/late-bloomer/>

[1] <http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/chapter05/>

~~~
McMoop
The same thing is done in the online version of Real World Haskell and is used
fairly effectively by the readers to share solutions and clarify concepts.

<http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/getting-started.html>

I believe this input was used in revising the book for the print version.

~~~
tikhonj
It is used effectively. Of course, programmers being programmers, it's also
used to point out errors and typos. I've also read a bunch of good comments
about choosing clearer wording for some parts.

If I was writing a blog (and I'll start one one of these days :P), I would
definitely want free, crowd-sourced editing that way!

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laurenproctor
I love the idea and not just for blogs. Think about this button's application
in learning environments like Coursera lecture notes or a Now You Lost Me!
button that allow users to append their thoughts to specific parts of a
lecture or video. Or what about a button you can press in a physical
classroom? It's really quite wonderful.

I agree with some of the comments though, my first reaction was, "Don't leave
it at where they got lost, let them tell you why." Maybe when users click the
button a text box can fly out (gethopper.com does this really well) that
allows users to append notes. In some cases admins will read all the feedback,
but if you want to get really fancy you could parse the responses for common
themes, keywords, etc to identify the most common points of confusion.

Looking forward to seeing this develop, this is great.

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jarofgreen
> Think how cool it would be, if we had this button in lecture notes and so
> on!

Years ago (2002?), I heard about a Uni that was handing out little clickers
that TV audiences get for live voting.

With these, students could rate how much they were understanding as the
lecture went along, or the lecturer could put up multi-choice questions for an
instant gauge of how well the students got it. (Crucially, all voting was
anonymous so students didn't feel like they were being tested.)

Apparently it really helped lecturers, but there was more than once when the
lecturer came to a complete stop because they didn't know where to go. (Better
than carrying on blindly not knowing no-ones with you tho.)

These days, with cheap smart-phones and wifi on campus it would be easy to do
something similar with just a website.

~~~
vhf
I'd be very interested if you could provide a link to the Uni experiment
you're talking about. Tried google without luck. Thanks

~~~
gromy
We used a device called an "iclicker" at my school that could do all of this,
though it was pretty much only used for paperless pop quizzes.

One benefit was immediately after, the teacher could display a bar chart
showing the correct multiple choice answer and how many students voted for
each of A,B,C,D thereby giving students and idea of where they ranked in the
class.

<http://www.iclicker.com/>

~~~
jarofgreen
How is that a benefit? Won't that just promote feelings of smugness or worry?
Surely a students independent learning is what's important, not where they
rank in an arbitrary group of others? Did they really emphasise this aspect of
it?

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Swizec
This is a really awesome idea, but it's missing an option to give a comment
with my confusion. It would be much clearer for the author if I could specify
what exactly confuses me.

~~~
vhf
Your comment confuses me.

Were you trying to say Krista lost you before the first PS ?

~~~
roryokane
No, I think Swizec was saying that he wanted the ability to write text after
clicking "Now you lost me!", to explain just why he is lost. For instance, he
might click the button and then write "I don't know who you meant by 'they' in
the second sentence." into a text field that popped up before clicking "Send
Feedback". Giving more specific feedback might help Krista fix the exact part
of the post that is broken more easily.

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pbiggar
I love it! We have a similar thing in my company. We run a hosted CI service
(<https://circleci.com>), and occasionally tests on Circle, but don't locally
for the customer. That would just cause the customer to stop using us (and
therefore not sign up at the end of the trial).

So we added a "report this build" button, and some text: "Uh-oh, this failed.
If you didn't expect it to, report this build and we'll look into it". Since
we added it about 3 months ago, this has led to dozens of bug fixes on our
end, tons of improvements to the docs and language in the app, and lots of
conversations with customers which helped us refine the product.

We should definitely add the same thing to our docs, like Stripe does. See the
footer at <https://stripe.com/docs/api>

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csense
It might be better to implement with a small (fits inline with text) '?' icon
next to each paragraph; clicking on it will show (or hide) a text field where
you can type your question.

Bonus points if you use cookies or server-side state to make the user's
question persistent (he's able to see what he typed if he reloads the page)
and have a way to see a list of all the latest comments across your website on
one page.

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MaxGabriel
This should be integrated with A/B testing (or some variant).

