User Feedback Basics

Sentry's User Feedback Widget is a powerful tool for capturing qualitative insights from real users, and is especially valuable during the rollout of new or beta features. Alternatively, it can be used to collect feedback from your fellow team members during an internal release.

Treat user feedback as a core signal in product development, especially for betas and early adopter programs. We recommend you integrate feedback review into planning, stand-ups, or retros; then you can use feedback trends to inform product direction and roadmap decisions.

This 4-step guide will walk you through implementing and instrumenting User Feedback on your application.

1. Embed the Widget Contextually

Bring the widget to the user; don't make them go find it.

Embed the feedback widget directly into experimental or high-impact feature areas. For example, on your checkout screen:

One approach you can take is using thumbs up/down buttons placed contextually within the feature that will trigger the feedback form to open. You can track whether a user clicked on the 👍 or 👎 for each feedback with custom tags. The tag will appear on the User Feedback Details page, and optionally on the feedback alert itself after feedback is submitted.

"use client";

import * as Sentry from "@sentry/react";
import { Fragment } from "react";

export default function ThumbsUpDownButtons({source}: {source: string) {
  const feedback = Sentry.getFeedback();
  
  return (
    <Fragment>
      <strong>Was this helpful?</strong>
      <button
        title="I like this"
        onClick={async () =>{
          const form = await feedback?.createForm({
            messagePlaceholder: 'What did you like most?',
            tags: {
              component: 'ThumbsUpDownButtons',
              'feedback.source': source,
              'feedback.type': 'positive',
            }
          });
          form?.appendToDom();
          form?.open();
        }}
      >
        Yes 👍
      </button>

      <button
        title="I don't like this"
        onClick={async () =>{
          const form = await feedback?.createForm({
            messagePlaceholder: 'How can we improve?',
            tags: {
              component: 'ThumbsUpDownButtons',
              'feedback.source': source,
              'feedback.type': 'negative',
            }
          });
          form?.appendToDom();
          form?.open();
        }}
      >
        No 👎
      </button>
    </Fragment>
  );
}

2. Customize Placeholder Text

Personalized prompts lead to better feedback. Tailor the placeholder text to the feature’s context.

Here are examples of placeholder text to guide users:

How was your experience with [your feature's name]?

How can we make your experience better?

We're still building out [your feature's name] - how can we make it better?

It's best to customize your prompts for clarity and relevance; this will guide the user to provide useful input. Use friendly language to encourage honest, casual feedback.

3. Add Custom Tags to Feedback Submissions For Better Routing

If you have multiple feedback buttons in your application that are embedded into different features, tags are critical in order to enable faster alert routing and triaging for the right teams.

You can auto-apply tags based on the widget’s placement. For example, use a custom tag like feedback.source:checkout. This allows for routing in Slack and filtering in dashboards. We recommend you define and standardize tags using a single key, such as feedback.source.

4. Set Up Alerts to Relevant Channels

Feedback is only useful if seen by the right folks.

You can send User Feedback directly into the appropriate team’s channel—whether you use Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Discord (see complete list of integrations). For example, you can tag feedback feedback.source:checkout and always have it go to your #proj-billing channel in Slack. With this workflow, engineers see feedback in near-real time and take ownership.

Follow the steps below to set up feedback alerts to relevant channels:

1. Create a New Alert Rule in Sentry.
2. Scroll to the "Set conditions" section and set the "IF" filter to The issue's category is equal to… "Feedback" and The event's tags match... [your custom tag].
3. In the “THEN” filter, select Send a [your integration] notification and then add details of the channel you'd like to send the feedback to. You can also add tags you’d like to see on the feedback alert. For example, user.email.
4. Add an alert name and owner.

Once set up, here's what an example alert looks like: