If you’re a company that cares about listening to your customer, there’s a good chance you’ve at least thought about adding a feedback widget to your product.
You’ll notice they’re particularly common in LLM products like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, where they appear right below the AI’s response to your prompt with a simple thumbs up and thumbs down:
What are your customers thinking?
One of the great things about website feedback widgets is that they help you answer that all important question: What are my customers thinking when using my product?
While you can send surveys, schedule interviews for deep dives, or tell customers to email you, few things are as convenient for them as being able to send you feedback in the moment while using your product.
That’s why so many companies have decided to build their own feedback widgets to embed inside their products.
As I’ve been researching and building Product Arrow, I’ve seen dozens of widgets across the products I use regularly and new ones I’ve been trying. And in doing so, I’ve found a few widgets that stand out as particularly beautiful, clever, or helpful.
Today, I want to share those with you, so you can consider adding some of their style or functionality to your product, too.
The 7 Best Product Feedback Widgets You Should Try
One of the things to keep in mind when you see a feedback widget is that they’re almost always built internally.
That means an engineer on the team squeezed it in during a sprint, and likely went for speed over style. In the end, the goal was to hear the customer, not win a design award. There are tickets for tasks tied to their core product to focus on, after all.
That’s why you’ll see a wide range of different widgets in this list. They vary in functionality, questions asked, and styling (or lack thereof). Yet, in each case, they’re doing at least one really interesting thing that I think is worth recognizing and asking, “Should we do that?”
With that caveat in mind, let’s dive in…
1) Function Health: A detailed, specific, and beautiful feedback widget
I know, it’s slightly ironic that after that caveat I start with a widget that truly is beautiful, but that’s exactly why I’m sharing it. While most widgets are bulky, utilitarian, and bordering on brutalism as their design style, Function took a different approach.
“How you do one thing is how you do everything.”
Function Health is a great product that helps you understand your health biomarkers. I’m a happy customer who has learned a lot about my health and areas for improvement.
And they clearly care a lot about design. Everything in the product seems to be placed with care and intention, so it’s no surprise they put the same effort into their feedback widget.
What’s nice about this widget, and what makes it stand out compared to others, is a couple of things:
- Great balance and spacing: The sizing of the box, the buttons, and the fact that they put it in a light box instead of just popping up in line all give it a great aesthetic.
- Smart use of color: When you give positive feedback, the quick options are green, while the quick options are an orange/red for negative feedback. The entire widget also perfectly matches the rest of their product’s styling and colors.
It’s also worth noting how committed to getting feedback Function is. Not only do they have the standard thumbs up and thumbs down in key areas of their product, but they also place another way to give feedback in the sidebar on some pages:
While this “Share Feedback” button goes to a Typeform instead of a widget, I know Function looks at it all, because every time I’ve sent them feedback, they have been very responsive to all of it.
2) Fathom: A feedback widget that understands location, location, location.
The whole point of a feedback widget is to get feedback in the moment while it’s fresh in your mind. That means it needs to have as little friction as possible.
For some products that’s easier than others.
When you’re an LLM and you’re displaying a long stream of text, of course you put the feedback buttons right below your output. But what do you do when your product is meant to largely operate in the background?
That’s the challenge Fathom has as a note-taking app, and I think they handled it quite cleverly:
Make room for feedback
I appreciate the “Get Help” button is in bright yellow in their tiny widget that runs their entire app on your computer. It makes it easy to spot and use to send in feedback.
It’s also great, because they’re consistent with it, making a similarly placed button with the same life preserver icon available inside their product when you’re watching old call recordings:
Even in products with a small footprint, or a lot of competing functionality, giving people a clear, easy way to send feedback is powerful. Fathom is a great example of how to handle that.
3) Agent.AI: The comprehensive feedback widget approach
Dharmesh Shah’s project, Agent.AI, takes what I would call the “Crude, but clear” approach to feedback.
For each agent, there are places to submit feedback at both the top and the bottom of the Agent you’re using:
Some may see this as kind of overkill, but if you want to be always accessible to your customer at the moment they have feedback, then approaches like this make sense.
Many of the Agents on this site create lengthy outputs. That means you have to scroll quite a bit to get to the end of them. By that time, you’re unlikely to scroll all the way back to the top if you have feedback on your mind.
And if an agent totally misses for you, you probably aren’t scrolling all the way to the bottom. You’re immediately thinking about leaving, which is where having the thumbs up / down right at the top, helps, too.
It is no surprise then that with Dharmesh’s approach to feedback that many of the apps on the Agent marketplace have thousands of reviews; he made it so easy to give feedback that the rate of reviews has to be higher than your average site.
4) Speedway Motors: Improve your search results and inventory at the same time.
Most of the other examples on this list are SaaS products, but they’re not the only business type that values customer feedback. E-commerce sites can also benefit from customer feedback, too.
And a great example of this is what Speedway Motors has built: Search Feedback.
Ask for feedback relevant to the situation your customer is in.
What are your customers doing when they use your search functionality? They’re looking for something.
And if they can’t find it, you might lose a customer to a competitor who has it.
That’s why it’s so smart that right at the bottom of search results, Speedway Motors asks if the customer can find what they need.
And if they choose thumbs down, they don’t just give them a generic feedback box. Instead, they give their customer the chance to submit a part they’d like Speedway to add to their inventory:
This helps them identify cases where either their search is broken (because they have the part, but the customer couldn’t find it), as well as new parts they should be adding to their inventory (with validation that someone was specifically looking for it!).
Either way, this is a perfect example of adapting your feedback to fit the situation, while also placing the feedback right at the point of frustration for a customer; how many pages of search results are you willing to scroll through before you would give up? When you hit that moment, their widget is right there before you go to page 22, or close your browser.
5) Routable: The quality of the questions you ask matters, too.
So far, the feedback widgets we’ve looked at have mostly followed the same pattern: click thumbs up or down, then answer a single question looking for more detail.
But that’s not the only way to get great feedback.
At Routable, they get very detailed, high quality feature requests from their customers, because they ask great questions that help them truly understand their customers.
In fact, it’s worked so well that they haven’t changed the question in over 5 years.
Turn feature requests into pure gold.
If you’ve ever received a feature request from a customer you know it’s often crude, unclear, and far from the ideal way to solve the real problem they have.
Typically, you need to have a deeper conversation with a customer to really understand what they wanted and why. And it’s then that you often discover that many other customers have the same problem, even though they may initially request different features to solve it. (For a vivid example of this, check out the story here.)
Routable’s team has solved this by asking some great questions as part of the feature request process. The following are the 3 questions (and help text) Routable uses to get amazingly detailed insights from their customers when they’re making a feature request:
- “Welcome! What feature should we add?” (Please let us know the expected outcome, too!)
- “How would this feature help your team?” (We’d love to know benefits to you, and your team members!)
- “Do you have an example we can reference?” (If you know of a company or website that does this well, we’d love to know)
What’s great about these are that they get their customers talking in detail. They use open ended questions starting with “What” and “How” to encourage them to write a lot, and then ask for examples. This is exactly what a PM or designer might start out asking, but instead they already have it.
Importantly, Routable takes the time to review every feature request together as a team. They also follow up frequently with their customers to let them know when they’re working on their suggestion. This incentivizes their customers to continue to submit new, detailed feature requests in the future.
6) MixPanel: Sometimes you just want a phone call.
I was recently listening to an old episode of Lenny’s Podcast, where he interviewed Oji Udezue (formerly of Typeform, Twitter, Calendly, and Atlassian). One of the things Oji talked about was how it’s critical for your PMs to have a steady stream of customer calls.
Yet, getting on the phone with customers is often a challenge. You have to know who to ask, you need them to be available for a call soon, and they need to open the email when you make the ask.
And that’s where Mixpanel’s widget shines. It makes it easy for people to immediately schedule a call if they want to:
Nothing beats a live conversation.
Even the best, most detailed customer feedback typed into a widget is only so helpful. A customer can only convey so much information and context into it.
Which is why cutting to the chase and just letting customers click to schedule a call makes a lot of sense.
This makes sure the PMs at Mixpanel are regularly talking to customers, and also gives the most passionate customers an immediate outlet to feel fully heard.
Of course, this tactic may not work for every team; if you have a large, freemium user base, or really want to filter who you have calls with, then it may not be for you. However, if your problem is that your team isn’t talking to enough customers, this is an easy way to get them scheduled. All they have to do is open up a few slots on their calendar and tie that to a scheduling app.
7) ChatPRD: AI-generated follow up questions to make your customers feel heard, fast.
While where you put the widget, how it works, and the look and feel of it all make a big difference, there’s one more element that really matters: Showing you’re listening👂.
As I’ve tried various feedback widgets, I’ve been amazed how often sending in detailed feedback goes to a black hole. I never hear back from them even to say, “Thanks!” or acknowledge that anyone ever looks at the feedback.
That’s why it was surprising and delightful to get this from Claire Vo, the founder of ChatPRD:
A good automation can make people feel heard.
This initial reply wasn’t from Claire herself. It was an automated message that was AI generated; you can tell based on the grey text at the bottom and the fact that the message asks a follow up question related to what I submitted.
From there, I can confirm that the real, human Claire responded to my followups. Yet, even if she didn’t, it’s still heads and shoulders above what most feedback widgets I tried do (which is absolutely nothing).
And this follow up message isn’t just about warm and fuzzies. It’s also about getting context.
By asking me to clarify, she can better diagnose issues and understand my requests. It’s an opportunity to build a deeper relationship with each customer that submits feedback, while also getting to the root cause of issues.
Given the incredible pace that ChatPRD has moved at despite her moonlighting for the first year of the business, I’m not surprised that she hand built her feedback widget to do this key, extra step. It will help her get more signal from what her customers are trying to tell her to build, fix, and improve.
Feedback is the lifeblood of great products.
How hard are you making it for your customers to give you feedback?
If you’re not getting much feedback from your customers, then adding a feedback widget like the examples above can be a great way to better understand their needs and make them feel heard.
Yet, not everyone can justify pulling an engineer off of mission critical work to hack together a widget like this. If you’re in that situation, then you’re in luck. With a simple install of some Javascript, Product Arrow allows you to have a widget like the ones described above including:
- Placing your thumbs up / down widget where you want it most in your product.
- Automatic styling to match your font, with the ability to customize the rest of the look and feel.
- Automated AI followup to get more context and make your customers feel heard .
- Optional audio to truly hear the voice of your customer with automatic transcription and sentiment analysis in seconds.
- Analysis, search, and smart routing so the right feedback is always accessible to the right product team.
And much more. Learn more about our product feedback widget, and sign up to get yours now here.