Reader feedback
Was this helpful? Yes or no, and optionally why.
Reader feedback
Section titled “Reader feedback”An optional control at the foot of each page: Was this helpful?, then an optional text box.
What is stored
Section titled “What is stored”The page, the response, the text, the timestamp, and privacy-safe session context. No reader identity, for the same reasons as reader analytics.
What you see
Section titled “What you see”- helpfulness percentage, per page and across the project;
- your worst pages, ranked;
- the comments themselves;
- the trend over your retention window.
It is not a comment system
Section titled “It is not a comment system”Feedback is private to you. Nothing a reader writes appears on the site, to other readers, or to anybody outside your workspace.
That is a deliberate difference from a public comment thread: a reader who has to sign their complaint writes a different, politer, less useful complaint.
Feedback is rate limited and spam filtered. A single reader cannot flood a page’s score, and an open text box on a public site does not become a spam target.
Reading it well
Section titled “Reading it well”A page at 40% helpful is not necessarily a badly written page. Three common causes, in order of how often they are the real one:
- The reader was on the wrong page. Search or a link sent them somewhere plausible and wrong. Fix the search tuning or the link.
- The page answers a different question. The title promises more than the body delivers.
- The page is wrong. Check its Pulse state before rewriting: the fastest explanation is often an API change nobody carried through.
Where it goes next
Section titled “Where it goes next”Sustained negative feedback is a suspicion signal in documentation health, and repeated negative feedback on one page becomes an inbox item with the count attached.
Tip
Look at the text before the percentage. Ten readers who all wrote the same sentence are worth more than a number, and they usually tell you which of the three causes above it is.