The Form Block needs more feedback from users

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There’s something that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while in relation to experimental and feature plugins that I think also extends to this concept of canonical plugins.

How can we better capture feedback from users?

Unless site owners are knowledgeable enough to report issues on GitHub or Trac (let’s be honest, no one reports plugin issues on Trac), there’s really no way to gather feedback from users to improve these recommended/official plugins. I’m not sure what this looks like, but it should be something that’s easy and convenient for both the users submitting feedback AND the maintainers that need to parse and understand it.

One plugin that first made me think about this was the Design Experiments plugin . It shipped with 4-6 features that a user could turn on and try out, but there was no way to know how many people were using each feature, and no way to collect feedback. This feels similar to the Performance Labs plugin.

The FSE Outreach program has honestly been wildly successful in gathering feedback about the block editor and full site editing and is a north star for something like this (huge props to @annezazu and everyone helping with that 🙏🏼). But that program definitely will not scale across many canonical/feature plugins with the limited contributor people hours available, and not all of them would require this level of attention for outreach.

@matt do you have any thoughts around this?
Jonathan Desrosiers 11:22 am on September 22, 2022

Having a mechanism to collect opt-in feedback on features earlier in the development cycle and before committing to specific a specific feature or implementation could be an incredibly valuable for informing the final path for new features. The process of creating issues/tickets to to share feedback is a big lift for those that might be able to share back valuable insights. Likewise, as @desrosj mentions, the FSE Outreach program has been an amazing source of feedback but the amount of time and effort required for that effort to be successful is quite labor intensive. The work of @annezazu on this program has been absolutely invaluable.

All that to say I’d love to see the effort of closing the feedback loops on development feedback less cumbersome both for those creating testing scenarios and those doing the testing.
Daisy Olsen 9:55 am on September 26, 2022

I think the forums and reviews for plugins are really excellent feedback mechanisms, and canonical plugins will have those just like any other plugin in the directory. It might inspire us to improve those areas of .org as well.

Outreach is always an option, doesn’t need to be as fancy as FSE I think there’s a lot to be gained just by asking a friend to try a plugin and watching them.

If we need usage data it’s probably best to get it aggregated from one of the web hosts rather than collect it ourselves, which is a can of worms especially with laws in EU and California.
Matt Mullenweg 8:01 pm on September 28, 2022

Refer: