How to get useful feedback/bug reports from users

Posted by Mikael Eliasson on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by Mikael Eliasson
Published on 2011-01-30T08:05:01Z Indexed on 2011/01/30 15:33 UTC
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Filed under:

usability

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users

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bugs

I'm sure most webmasters have recived a mail like this:

Creating [insert item here] is not working!

When you check it out there is no general problem with the function but rather the user has discovered an edge case. Almost every mail I get is like this and in the long run it gets a bit annoying to always have to ask the user for more information.

Is there anything I can do to get my users provide more useful feedback? Right now I have a mailto: for the webmaster mail in the page footer. I was thinking of changing this so that they have to report through a form on the site.

Anyone got any experience with this? Do you get better/more reports by having a feedback form instead of giving the users the email?

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