Greetings, Insiders! We’ve thrown a couple surveys at you this year and we went through every submission you sent to us. There is a ton of valuable information you provided on how we can improve. We heard that the rate of updates to your feedback suggestions is a frustration, some of our Insider pages need updating, and the engagement from the team can be improved. I personally appreciate everyone’s candid thoughts on how we are doing; there is no way we can improve without helpful feedback from our community. As we work to make improvements across our communities, I wanted to share what we heard from you and what else we want to improve.
February 2022 Insider Survey
We didn’t talk much about the survey results from earlier this year, and we’d like to apologize for that. We looked at the feedback you provided, organized it into the themes we identified, shared it with the right groups so they know how our community feels, and made sure our team knew what our next steps were to help improve things. Here on our Insider forums, it’s clear you all crave more engagement directly from the team, but in general you are pretty satisfied with this space. You also told us that there are ways we can improve the Dev channel for smoother testing of features (for example, a slimmed-down version of the channel), and asked for us to provide more details about what new flags do when they are implemented. For Twitter, we have improvements we can make, although those of you who submitted feedback to us do like what we utilize our Twitter handle for (in our case, we mean the MSEdgeDev Twitter account). Our Reddit communities told us they would also like more engagement on their posts, and I believe this is the space where we can improve the most. We also did a separate survey for our Insiders who only see our What’s New page, and there were a ton of insights you all shared about the Insider website in general. We understand that there can be changes to the website like making the community stand out more, making it clear on how to find things within the program, and making improvements to the Insider road map. The results of this survey also drove us to push out the Feedback Survey in June: we wanted to gather more data to get a clearer understanding of what you were telling us regarding feedback submissions in February’s survey.
Feedback submissions for the browser
The feedback survey was a detailed peek into your pain points. We got 136 responses, and it took on average an hour to complete. I really need to thank you all for taking that time to give the team your thoughts. I know that survey was lengthy, but you truly helped us identify our feedback gaps, some of which we knew, and some of which you illuminated for us. We will aim to have a much shorter survey in the future; it will be focused more on hearing your personal experiences with the improvements we plan on making and if there are other improvements we can work on.
First up, discoverability.
Finding out how to submit feedback to the team can be difficult. We have about 5 different ways you can submit feedback to the Microsoft Edge team, and that’s not counting if you simply message an employee your feedback. That’s a lot to work through and it can be really frustrating to figure out which method is the best method for your feedback. We want to clear that up for our community. One of the ways we do this is the bottom of my Reddit Dev update posts and the bottom of the first tile on the Insider update pages, but not every Insider sees these things – a totally fair callout! Y’all made an amazing suggestion for us to have a dedicated page on our Insider website that helps clear up what feedback platform is for what, and how to send feedback to make it the most actionable. and the bottom of the first tile on the Insider update pages, but not every Insider sees these things – a totally fair callout! Y’all made an amazing suggestion for us to have a dedicated page on our Insider website that helps clear up what feedback platform is for what, and how to send feedback to make it the most actionable.
Next, engagement.
Y’all want more ways to engage with feedback submissions, and we get that. This is something we have heard from the community since we moved away from the Windows Feedback Hub. In this survey, we heard that you feel submitting feedback is like it’s being sent to a black hole, the experience for the tools can be clunky, your preferred way of submitting feedback is through our in-app tool, and you all really enjoy the features currently available on the Community Feedback site. With the addition of the Community Feedback site at the end of 2021, we started working towards giving you the feedback visibility and engagement features you’ve missed. There are more ways we can get the word out about this space: that Insider page explaining the best places to submit feedback is one step we are taking to help with this. There are benefits to this new platform like being able to see your feedback submissions on the My Feedback page and the ability to vote and comment on others’ feedback. We are working with our partners on that team and have plans for you to be able to track your Community Feedback suggestions directly in our in-app feedback tool. We hope to have more updates around those Community Feedback improvements as we get them.
Engagement also includes the status updates for our public feedback list from the team. We have been painfully aware of how stale this list looks, with several items remaining on it for longer than a year with no update. With scarce updates, it looks like we have let that list fall to the wayside, and we understand how frustrating that is to you all. We are working on better ways to surface your feedback to you, make it clearer how your feedback ends up on these lists, and the improvements we want are looking for on the Community Feedback site will make it easier to track your feedback and get answers directly from Microsoft.
And lastly, how frequently we update things is a frustration.
This is another fair criticism, and one we have heard since we reduced the Top Feedback Summary to monthly updates. We don’t have solid plans currently while we work on everything I have talked about so far, but there are things we will improve further down the road. We are looking at how to better communicate to you when new feedback suggestions appear publicly, how we can improve not only the community team’s engagement with feedback but also our engineering and PM teammates’ since they may be new to chatting with our community, and how you all can engage with each other’s feedback suggestions. We aren’t going to sugarcoat this: there are a lot of changes that we know need to happen, and it’s going to be a long road ahead of us. We are focusing on platform and website improvements first, for which we will be creating new, meaningful ways for our team to engage with your feedback submissions.
Insider Roadmap
We heard from the community that the Insider roadmap leaves much to be desired. We understand the pain points and were already talking internally about updates that page needs. Your feedback on this helped us push up these plans so that we can work on making the roadmap a more actionable page for you all to keep track of what is being released and what version you can expect to see it in. As we work on improving that page, we are going to take it down temporarily. Not to fret, though! You can still watch for updates on our What’s New page to track what we are adding into our Dev and Canary channels, as has been tradition.
Community support updates
We created the Insider ticketed support team to ensure early adopters of Chromium-based Microsoft Edge had a direct path to the team to provide diagnostics for any issues they hit and a space to empower our community who may be more comfortable with one-on-one conversations. Since our release, our community made it clear they prefer to provide feedback in other social spaces like Answers, Reddit, and here on our Insider forum – if they weren’t already using our in-app feedback tool, that is. Based on community feedback from both surveys, we are transitioning our private support space over to our public forums. Publicly providing answers to the community enables others to easily find the answers they are looking for, as well as allows the community to collaboratively figure out and share answers.
Starting next week, you will no longer be able to submit a ticket to our Insider support for assistance. For those of you who used our Insider ticketed support in the past, we encourage you to make our Tech Community forum your new home for feedback and bug reporting. Our team is around to answer posts and report feedback to the right people. Having frustrations with the Stable channel? Our Answers forum is the best place to post your feedback, and where the volunteer moderators there can escalate issues back to our team if there should be an investigation.
Along with this change comes the addition of AutoModerator in the Edge subreddits. This is something I have been working on building in collaboration with my team and a few volunteer moderators since the Insider survey from February 2022. This will help those who post in our subreddits find quick tips to potentially resolve most issues, understand how to get us their device’s diagnostics for bugs, and discover some handy links for popular questions. It will then talk about how to flag one of us for more help. We believe that AutoModerator responding on new Bug and Feature Feedback posts will help the community get their answers faster.
I want to take this time to reiterate: we read every post that comes through our social channels and work hard to triage all of the feedback sent in through the browser directly. We may not respond to everyone, but please know that we are reviewing everything you all provide to us and sharing your feedback with the team frequently. We take swift action on bug reports so that the team is aware of potential issues before they spread further. We do understand that this creates the perception that we are not acting on your posts; we have active communities across all of the spaces we monitor, and we want to make sure the team gets those details as fast as possible, which may cause a delay in response.
Wrap up
There is so much information here, and if you got to this point, THANK YOU. Thank you for submitting feedback to us, thank you for being honest, and thank you for checking out how we are planning on improving things in response to your feedback. You will see changes starting next week with more to follow in the coming months. We’ll also do another Insider survey at the end of the year to find out if these changes improve the entire feedback experience. We are really excited to make these improvements! I know we say this a lot, but we really could not do this without you! This is also your community and the only way we can improve for everyone is through collaboration with each other. Until our next update, Insiders!
Microsoft
