14 DAY TRIAL // Back in October 2014 when it launched the Windows Insider program, Microsoft promised the future of Windows would be entirely decided by users, who were invited to participate in the development of the operating system by testing preview builds, sending feedback, and sharing their suggestions.
To streamline the relationship between the company and users, Microsoft launched the Insider Hub for Windows Insiders, an app whose purpose was to allow testers to send feedback in a more effective manner.
The app eventually became the Feedback Hub in May 2016, just ahead of the debut of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, with Microsoft also opening it to everyone.
Beginning with this change, pretty much anyone running Windows 10 can send feedback to the company using the Feedback Hub.
Needless to say, Microsoft has insisted for Windows 10 users to always turn to the Feedback Hub whenever they had a new idea for the operating system or they came across something they believed needed to be improved. Whether or not Microsoft used this feedback to improve Windows 10 is something that’s totally debatable, but on the other hand, there were times when the company actually made people believe reporting bugs was just a waste of time.
Back in 2018, Microsoft launched the Windows 10 October 2018 Update with a glitch that caused the removal of files stored in libraries. While this wasn’t a widespread problem, it forced Microsoft to pull the feature update completely, only to be discovered that several users reported it in the Feedback Hub months before the go-ahead was given.
So technically, users told Microsoft about this issue, only that the company missed it.
More recently, users discovered that the Feedback Hub has become the home of political trolls and spammers, with some of their posts being there for more than a month. For some reason, nobody at Microsoft removed these abusive posts, and as you can see in the screenshot here, the Feedback Hub can barely be considered a platform for sharing feedback right now.
Given all of these, the criticism against Microsoft and the way it handles feedback is gaining traction. Does Microsoft even care about feedback? This is the question that so many users ask these days, obviously with no answer that could convince them sending feedback is still worth the effort.
While the Feedback Hub is more or less a flop, I think Microsoft can still save it. And here are the three changes that the company should implement as soon as possible to prioritize high-quality submissions:
Introduce an upvote/downvote feature for feedback. The Feedback Hub already allows users to upvote certain ideas, but on the other hand, downvoting isn’t possible. A reddit-like approach would make it much easier for high-quality submissions to be prioritized, while things like spam and redundant posts would just go away much faster.
Hire a dedicated team for keeping things organized. Removing spam and posts that don’t make any sense, grouping submissions in collections, and overall taking care of the Feedback Hub just like it happens on an online community is something that should happen in this app too. The Feedback Hub is just too important for the future of Windows to leave spam in there for 30 days without anyone caring about it.
Share more information about what’s happening with the feedback. Every submission (or collection) should receive a response from the dev team, and Microsoft should clearly indicate what it’s working on and what it plans to do with the feedback in the long term. One example of how this could work is the Waze feedback forum (hosted on UserVoice), where the Google-owned team marks submissions with a series of tags like planned, in the works, or released. Microsoft is using the same platform for some of its products, including OneDrive.
At the end of the day, the Feedback Hub isn’t at all a bad idea, it’s just poorly implemented and barely taken care of. With the right improvements, it can become the app that can allow users to contribute to the development of Windows, just like Microsoft promised in the first place. Of course, if the company really cares about feedback.