In summary:
- Microsoft launches an updated Feedback Hub in Windows Insider Canary Build 29553.1000, featuring a streamlined interface for user feedback on Windows issues and suggestions.
- PCWorld reports the new tool includes Community Feedback functionality, allowing users to search, endorse, and collaborate on others’ suggestions while integrating Snipping Tool for easier screenshot submissions.
- The modernized hub encourages both problem reports and compliments, providing Microsoft with direct user input to enhance Windows development and user experience.
Microsoft is trying to fix persistent problems with Windows — and wants to know more. Are you in? If you are, Microsoft has a new Feedback Hub for you to try out.
Yes, Microsoft looks at comments on social media and other sources on the internet. But the Feedback Hub is your direct line to Microsoft, where you can complain, make suggestions, and more. The Windows Insider Canary Build 29553.1000 adds an updated, streamlined interface for those comments. A similar build appears in the Dev Channel.
The Feedback Hub generally works with you providing your criticism to Microsoft, though Microsoft also provides an avenue for you to add to or support feedback that others have given. The new Feedback Hub has been “modernized,” with a new, more compact user interface. It appears that the goal here is to allow for snap reactions — “focused feedback” — as well as more thoughtful analysis. In fact, that’s the default view, with buttons for reporting a problem, making suggestions, or (and this is new!) providing a compliment, too. All of this can be either public or private.
The new tool also leans into the Snipping Tool, allowing you to quickly take a snapshot and submit it. The Feedback Tool once allowed you to provide a screen recording of your issue, and it’s unclear if Microsoft has preserved this feature.
Microsoft
There have been some changes: Other feedback now is called Community Feedback, and you’ll be able to search and see what others have said, and endorse it. Microsoft has removed the announcements section, though, referring you to Windows Insider blog posts with this announcement and forthcoming additions.
Microsoft ambitiously hopes to restore some of the goodwill that it once had with a major commitment to improving Windows as well as a new section in the Feedback Hub for compliments. “Call out what’s working well,” Microsoft says. Or not.
Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor, PCWorld
Mark has written for PCWorld for the last decade, with 30 years of experience covering technology. He has authored over 3,500 articles for PCWorld alone, covering PC microprocessors, peripherals, and Microsoft Windows, among other topics. Mark has written for publications including PC Magazine, Byte, eWEEK, Popular Science and Electronic Buyers' News, where he shared a Jesse H. Neal Award for breaking news. He recently handed over a collection of several dozen Thunderbolt docks and USB-C hubs because his office simply has no more room.