If you give people room to write half a page of feedback, they'll feel pressured to do just that.
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Not only does this creates anxiety for the feedback giver, it creates a sh*t sandwich of advice.
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It goes like this:
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β"[Bread] Here's something good that you do!! :) I really like this thing :):). It's great, I wish others did it!
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[Meat] Sometimes you do this other thing though that [really p**** me off] isn't great.
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[Bread] But don't forget that good thing I mentioned before!! So good. You rock."
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Huh? What should I focus on here? What's the message? Is there something to work on?
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If you instead give people only a few lines of feedback to write, split into the Fact and Feeling (i.e. Action and Reaction), then there's no room for waffle.
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Feedback will be concise and actionable. And it will take less time to write out.
We found this out through trial and error at Howamigoing. We used to give people 900 characters to write qualitative feedback. Then we reduced the fields to 280 characters - the same length as a tweet . The result?
Higher completion rate for feedback β
More helpful feedback π (according to the employees we asked)