I'm wrapping up my last year of school and plan on applying for the summer YC program with two friends to work on a project we're experimenting with now. One of the key elements that I proposed was having an absolute seamless user feedback system.<p>I spent the past six months as an intern at a company that practiced a mix of scrum and XP methodologies and learned how important getting feedback is for the success and direction of a product, so I'm asking every bright person here for any examples or ideas in integrating in a feedback system for a web application. I like twitter.com's system [<a href="http://twitter.com/help" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/help</a>], but that is simply to request to get help. What about a way of allowing for user suggestions? My only concern is that it could easily be "overdone" and draw away from a clean and usable site.
I liked Reddit's system. Click on a prominent "feedback" link (in the early Reddit it was in the top left, and one of the most prominent actions on the page), it takes you to a page with a textbox that e-mails the founders. I submitted a couple bug reports to Reddit when it was a few months old and got back fixes within the hour, which was one of the main reasons I decided to stick around.<p>Also, don't underestimate the usefulness of forums. They become a pain to manage when you get big, but they're absolutely invaluable at getting feedback and building community when you're small. Forums let power-users help newbies (pulling some of the support load off you), and they also give users a chance to weigh in with "No, that's a <i>terrible</i> idea" when another user proposes a half-baked idea. When I was working on FictionAlley, there were many times when a user came up with a suggestion, I was like "Yeah, I can implement that", then other users chimed in with "Please don't; it'll ruin things for the rest of us. Here's what you could try instead."