Someone sent us feedback last week and I couldn't work out what they meant. I pasted it into ChatGPT, went back and forth a few times, and there it was: a good idea, buried in a sentence I'd almost skipped past.

That's backwards. I had a conversation about their feedback with a machine, when the person who wrote it was right there. The form just had no way to ask them anything.

A feedback form should be able to ask a follow-up. It should know what we're already planning and what other people have asked for, and be able to say: do you mean this, or this? Would that fix it? Almost nobody can write a good feature request. Almost everyone can answer three questions about the thing they're trying to describe.

Feedback forms have been suggestion boxes for thirty years because listening properly didn't scale. It does now.