How does providing users with the option to flag wrong content influence the perception of product quality?

Question

We're providing various learning content on our webpage. Sometimes users send us emails complaining about specific content that we need to fix. Without further description it is often quite difficult and time consuming to find the content that was mentioned in the emails. I'd like to propose a flag button that allow users to pinpoint content that is wrong so we can easily find it for better QA. But decision makers are afraid that users will perceive the content as less valuable if there's a button suggesting there are potential errors.

Do you have any information on how such a UI decision could affect users perception? Any idea on how to win decision makers over?

Answer 1

Asking for feedback is (almost) always a positive endeavour. It lets your users know you care about the quality of your content and service, and that you value your users' opinion.

If you don't ask for feedback, the only way for a user to let you know they like or don't like something, is through a coincidentally well time survey. More often than not, they won't do anything. That only happens if the problem is so serious they'll contact your support service. But for the minor annoyances and issues, your user will ignore the problem or give up.

Giving feedback for accuracy is a pattern you'll find in many FAQs and/or help articles. Instead of using a flag, which is a negative symbol for reporting inappropriate content, you could use a monicker like 'was this helpful? YES/NO' and then provide options to why the user believes the content was not accurate. In your case, a 'how can we make this article better for you?' might be better.

You can display a multitude of predefined options to process common complaints, or let users freestyle their feedback. Since you're dealing with a very specific userbase and rather detailed feedback, you may want to use a textbox. This will be more work for you to process the feedback, but you'll be able to do more with it. If you decide to go this route, do let users know you value their time and that you will use their feedback to improve the service. Optionally you can ask for their email address to give them a heads-up for when the content has been changed, or for more details.

It's important to keep the feedback form low entry; if you ask too many things or too complex questions, you risk making the user feel like they have to do actual work. So make sure the feedback box is as simple and easy to use as possible, or you’ll be missing out on the feedback that it was designed to catch.

Answer 2

Instead of a flag which is often considered with reporting negative stuff you could change it to a feedback kind of style button and ask the users for feedback.

Its all about the wording after that, you can still provide dropdowns for the users to pinpoint to different areas and express errors without giving it a completely negativ touch.

Ps.: i think your decision makers are wrong, why would someone think "oh this is less valuable because they ask me for my opinion".