The Editors, part of the BBC blog network, recently featured an interesting post about redesigning the Newsnight website. It’s a call to action from Newsnight editor Peter Barron, who asks readers to let him know what they like and don”t like about the current website via the comments. He says:

“Let us know what you love and hate, what you visit all the time, what you never visit but are glad is there…Do you want to read long articles, view video, download podcasts or talk to each other?…And are there features we should quietly put out of their misery?…The pruning shears are in your hands”.

The post has generated some good comments and suggestions, about navigation and structure on the homepage, improving accessibility and suggestions for new content and features. By asking these questions through The Editors blog, Newsnight has managed to reach a highly-engaged audience and therefore achieved a level of feedback and insight that can be difficult to solicit through a standard online survey.

I like this approach to gathering feedback from users and assessing website performance, and can see a role for it alongside other mechanisms like website analytics, surveys, focus groups and user testing. The informality of the ”comments” approach lends itself particularly well to gathering frequent, ongoing feedback, as well as testing out new ideas.

Update: The revamped Newsnight website launched at the end of August. A post on the Newsnight blog says: “Many raised similar themes and we’ve tried to incorporate or reflect most of them. The result is, we hope, less cluttered, clearer and much easier to navigate. And, as many of you requested, we’ve killed the GorDaq”.