I stumbled across this excellent resource today. It’s called UserVoice and it’s a free tool to collect feedback from your users and let them make suggestions.

The reason why this is so brilliant is that it’s something you know you should do with every project, but it’s low enough priority that you never get around to doing it. Usually I end up doing it informally like by emailing some people, or waiting for a complaint to come in. But there is phenomenal gains in making it as easy as possible for people.

Google used this technique successfully throughout the beta launch of Gmail, which won all sorts of awards for doing exactly what people wanted. Dell used this technique successfully with their site DellIdeaStorm to figure out that their users wanted to buy PC’s with linux on them. They never would have known if they didn’t ask, and now Dell makes a bunch more money offering that product.

No business is perfect when you first launch it. But luckily you don’t need to guess what people want. If you’re good at ASKING your customers what they want they’ll tell you. It’s no secret.

Now you have the same quality tools as Google and Dell to listen to your customers. It’s a fully featured site that has built in voting, anyone can submit a new idea, and duplicates are caught. And it’s free.

There are even two little widgets you can install on your site to help you collect data. One of them you can see on the right side of this blog which I’m using to allow people to suggest new blog topics.

To try it out, click the above image and suggest or vote on a post idea. The second type of widget I’ve installed on my tutoring site to get feedback and suggestions from clients and tutors.

This is really an outstanding site that just made things a lot easier for the small business owner. Nice work UserVoice!