As the Government of Yukon's user experience (UX) manager I spend a lot of time immersing myself in user feedback. When people submit feedback using the form at the bottom of a Yukon.ca page, we get quite a few questions from people asking things like:

• what happens to the feedback?
• where does it go? and
• who looks at it?

I cannot respond to these inquiries because we do not collect personal information via the feedback form. And these are really good questions so it inspired me to describe the process here. 

You take time to send us your two cents, but then what happens?

The short answer is we collect your comments (user feedback) in Drupal and we use it to make the website better. This is how we do it.

eServices for Citizens

As the UX manager – reviewing user feedback is an incredibly important technique I use to:

• identify issues people are having;
• gain insights into user sentiment to understand what are people enjoying on the website and what we should work on;
• monitor content related to services my group (eServices) manage; and
• identify any gaps where we might not be meeting citizen expectations. 

These inform the UX roadmap for the government to ensure we are working on addressing issues that matter to people who use the website. 

Executive Council Office (ECO) digital team

ECO's digital team also spends a lot of time immersed in user feedback. Every month they:

• clean up the data to get rid of comments that are spam or don't meet our commenting policy; and
• share the report with the department and corporation website managers.

If they notice they continue to get feedback on an issue they've identified – they follow up with departments to make sure the issue is addressed. And they track this over time – the goal being to see fewer or no more reports of the same issue.

Government of Yukon departments and corporations

The department website managers can then address issues and implement fixes. They work with the program that manages the content to make this happen. So, if you happen to be on a page about farming in the Yukon and you send in your comment – it will go to ECO, the Department of Energy, Mines and Resources website manager and the person at the Agriculture branch who manages that page. They work together to address the issue. 

Thumbs-up or thumbs-down?

To submit feedback on Yukon.ca you can give the page a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. When you select one of these options, you are prompted to leave a comment. We do this so we collect information that will help us pinpoint exactly what we are doing well and what we need to improve.

The good – How did this page help you?

When you click on the thumbs-up icon we ask you how the page helped you. It's important we know what we are doing well because we want to do more of it! We care about your experience on the website and we want it to work for you. We also like inspiring our colleagues and when a page gets a nice compliment – we pass it along so they know they are doing a good job. And we hope if encourages others to follow their lead.

The bad – How can we improve this page?

When you click on the thumbs-down icon we ask you how we could improve the webpage. Sometimes we get a little too focused on our business needs (why the page exists) and it's really helpful for us to capture user needs in your words. This helps us work with program areas and encourages them to implement fixes (often suggested by you) and balance their needs with user needs. 

All of the department clients we work with have one thing in common – they care about their clients and they want to make things easy for them. This feedback really helps us facilitate conversations, communicate fixes and improve the overall user experience. 

Thanks for your feedback

We get thousands of feedback submissions every year and we know this takes time for people to fill out. There is nothing worse than submitting feedback and then finding out no one actually looks at it. We're grateful for all the feedback we get, we're thankful you take the time to tell us what you like and what we can do better and we do use it to make improvements to Yukon.ca and all the government's websites and digital services. 

If you have questions about user feedback and what we do with it email eservices@yukon.ca or comment on this post.