Does this sound familiar?

"Your feedback is important to us. Although we do not have the resources to respond to every email, be assured that we read every single message."

If you have a Web site, you probably receive lots of feedback and comments via email. And chances are you live by the statement above. You read every message, and file it to some archive folder. We know what our users are thinking, right? That must be enough?

Although you should not believe everything users tell you about the usability of your Web site, feedback from users is still one of your most valuable resources. Visitors to your Web site or customers will mail for all kinds of reasons. They have problems. They are looking for something but cannot find it easily on your site. They have suggestions. They have comments. And they have great ideas. Just reading and filing is a waste of this feedback.

Instead, you should put it to work, and it should put you to work using these steps:

1. Distribute comments. Make sure everybody who has anything to do with the specific user, the Web site, or the topic of the user's feedback reads the email. If you cannot find a good argument against mailing the feedback to particular employees, forward the message to them.

2. Act. Many of the ideas found in user email are easy to implement. Many of the problems are easy to fix. When you read the user's email is the time to work on it. Now you are concerned anyway. If you fix a problem, try to fix it for all users, not just the one who complained.

3. Collect emails. Some emails are just general comments or complaints (sometimes we receive praise, too). Just because the email does not ask you to act immediately does not mean you should do nothing. Collect these messages in an organised way. That's filing, you say? Right, but wait for the next steps.

4. Summarise them. All the general comments you collected are great, but who wants to read them? They probably make a large pile of emails. Often the ideas and problems that you could not implement or fix immediately are simply forgotten. To make dealing with all these emails easier, or possible, sum them up, with lots of quotations. We don't want this to get too boring.

5. Make it stick. The summaries from step four are simply a nice exercise if you file and forget them. Put them in a place where everybody can - and will - see them. Print them and put them on the wall. Put them on post-it notes around your desk. Use them as a screen saver. Dedicate a monitor at a prominent place to run this screen saver. Whatever you do, make sure the comments stick in the minds of all employees.

Of course you do not use these steps only once or one after the other, but they should become a routine. Summarising is probably the most essential - and most difficult - part of the strategy. If you manage to get this done well, it will help you with all the other steps.

Designing a Web site is like loving a baby.

"Loving a baby is a circular process, a kind of feedback loop. The more you give the more you get and the more you get the more you feel like giving." - Penelope Leach