dribbble.com comments 11/6/13

Encouraging Meaningful Feedback

A proposal for better creative feedback online

First, let me start with my biggest pet-peeve with Dribbble. It is almost entirely full of meaningless feedback. “Awesome,” “beautiful” and “very nice” seem to be the only messages left in the comments, but isn’t this serving the same purpose as hitting a “like” button? Sure our posts look more impressive when we have 478 likes and 42 comments, but this seems only to devalue comments as a true feedback mechanism.

Dribbble isn’t the only site to suffer from this, Behance is equally full of short comments and many blog posts or video comments seem to suffer even more.

I would like to propose a possible solution to this problem; a character minimum.

Much like how Twitter uses its 140 character maximum to force a tweeter to create a concise and hopefully more meaningful message, I believe that forcing a commenter to use a minimum number of characters in a comment post will make them think more deeply about what they want to say and hopefully realize that they have more to contribute to the conversation than, “Very cool!”

As far as how many characters this minimum should be, I’ve done quite a bit of research on comments from both Dribbble and Behance, and the point in which a comment goes from a benign pat-on-the-back to thoughtful commentary seems to be right around 50 characters. Without directly quoting people’s comments, the responses that at least came in around 50 characters not only provided a more personal insight into how the viewer connected with the piece, but in many cases also spawned a conversation where other commenters either responded back or reiterated the same insights or questions. In quite a few cases, questions that were asked received answers from the artist/designer.

I believe setting a character minimum can not only help to generate more meaningful commentary and conversation, but also help to give more power to both the like and comment feedback mechanisms by giving them each a greater distinction.

Unfortunately, I do not have a forum of my own in which to try this. I am hoping that someone who does, will be willing to give a character minumum a try and share their findings with us. If you do try it out, please share your findings whether they are good or bad.