

Show HN: Mobile feedback your users will love - willwhitney
http://audobox.com

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gfodor
This seems really smart. It would be fun if the author could post some metrics
here. I'd be really curious if you guys ran a split test of audio vs text
feedback to see how the numbers change. It seems obvious this will lower the
barrier for many people to leave feedback. If you have hard numbers on this
that are convincing, they should definitely be front-and-center on your
website.

One potential concern is that spoken feedback on the whole will be less
precise and clear than written feedback. In general though I've found feedback
from users is generally pretty poor on the signal to noise ratio anyway,
giving only broad strokes of where problems are, so this might not matter. As
a fun bonus with audio feedback you can pick up their tone of voice to gauge
just how pissed off and frustrated they really are!

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willwhitney
From our pseudo-scientific testing, we got ~5x voice feedback over email
feedback. We're still early in the process, so we don't have any rock-solid
numbers.

One advantage we found from spoken feedback is that on mobile, people tend to
be unwilling to type out a very detailed report, whereas that same level of
detail is pretty fast to say.

And yeah — you can definitely tell how happy (or unhappy) they are with the
product :)

~~~
roadg33k
Interesting.

Im curious, Are you also getting blank audio files?

~~~
willwhitney
We only upload files that are at least two seconds long to prevent exactly
this problem.

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blake8086
This is such a great idea. I love how much you've worked to ensure it takes
the least number of taps possible to send feedback.

One suggestion: show a meter or light or any kind of feedback that the user is
being loud enough. I suspect your #1 problem with bad user-submitted feedback
will be "couldn't really hear anything".

~~~
gtank
Good suggestion- that may be worth adding.

Anecdotally, though, we've been using this ourselves for a while without
seeing that. People seem to get that they should speak clearly.

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mattront
We used to have a similar in-house developed audio feedback in one of our apps
[1]. The engagement rate was low. We replaced it with the standard email
feedback and we got an order of magnitude more feedback. Plus with email, you
automatically get the ability to answer back and communicate with the
customer. In my opinion users prefer UX concepts they are used to, even if
they are less efficient. But it probably also depends on the app type and its
audience. So best to test it for yourself and see what works.

There was also a startup doing this [2]. Looks inactive since their iOS SDK is
"coming soon" for already a year.

[1] [http://focusofmyday.com](http://focusofmyday.com) [2]
[http://saygent.com/](http://saygent.com/)

~~~
willwhitney
Great to know — thanks for the info. We got a sharp rise in feedback when we
were using this in our app, but like you say, it's probably to some extent
dependent on the particular app.

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MasterScrat
Are you sure users are comfortable actually speaking out loud?

I feel there's some kind of "sound barrier": we're used to typing and swiping
and rotating but we rarely get to talk without immediate feedback...

~~~
derefr
I'm definitely not. Most places I'm using my mobile device, rather than a Real
Computer, are because I'm in some public setting: on the street, in a
restaurant, on a bus. Not good places to record a monologue.

~~~
skndr
At the same time, the thing in your hand is also a phone.

~~~
mikeash
These days, I would prefer to say that the thing in your hand _has_ a phone
app, and for many people that app gets very little use.

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fatbat
Interesting. I think this is a good idea seeing as how I kind of do this
already except with voice transcribe on the keyboard.

Unlike a text report though where users can edit or take a moment to collect
their thoughts, I think voice feedback will create alot of recordings where
people are unprepared and thus unable to structure deeper more meaningful
feedback.

That said, I am curious on how many users accidentally release their hold or
submit multiple feedbacks as they add more info?

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covgjai
We used to have a similar feedback system and tried it with our in-house
development & QA but it didn't work well. Giving feedback takes lot of writing
and rewriting, with traditional writing, users can review and make corrections
but with audio users will have to delete and start everything from scratch
again. This is our personnel experience, you may be seeing better results as
your target audience is different.

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baddox
I've been proven wrong before, but I'm very skeptical that something which
requires the user to speak at the phone will convert well.

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chadlpowell
gathering reliable feedback in-app is a nagging problem. i'm excited to see
audobox on iOS soon.

