What is a feedback form?

What is a feedback form?

A feedback form is a short set of fields that lets a customer send a message about your product. It records what kind of message it is, what the person wants to say, and optionally how to reach them. The form can sit inside the product, live on its own web address, or be shared as a link in an email or a help page. Its job is to make the first step of telling you something as easy as possible.

The best feedback forms are deliberately small. They ask for the message and little else, then rely on the product to attach what it already knows, such as the page the person was viewing when they wrote.

What are the three kinds of feedback form?

Forms come in three shapes, and each one suits a different moment:

Form type	Where it lives	Best for
Embedded	Inside your product or site, usually behind a button	Feedback about a specific screen, sent while it is still fresh
Hosted	Its own web address, linked from emails, docs or a footer	Customers outside the app, or people without an account
Survey	A set of questions sent to a list of people on a schedule	Measuring one score across many customers at once

Escuta Produto offers the first two. The widget is an embedded form behind a floating button, and the hosted page at /f/your-product-slug is a standalone form that uses the product's accent color. It does not run survey or NPS campaigns. A team that needs a scheduled score should use a separate survey tool and keep this message form for open feedback.

Forms also differ in what they ask people to remember. A form that asks for an account number, a version string or a browser name makes the customer do research before they can write. Let the product supply those details automatically when it can, and reserve the visible fields for things only the customer knows, such as what they were trying to do. The customer's own words are the scarce resource, so the form should spend its space on them.

Test the form yourself on a phone. If the message box is hard to reach with a thumb, or the keyboard covers the send button, fix that before anything else.

Which fields are worth keeping?

Keep the fields that change what you do next, and drop the rest:

• Type. Bug, idea, praise or other. It sorts the inbox before anyone reads a word.
• Message. The one field that matters most. The REST API requires at least two characters, but a full sentence is far more useful than a single word.
• Email. Needed if you want to reply. Hide it when you already know who the person is.
• Rating. An optional scale of one to five stars gives a quick sense of mood. Keep it optional.
• Name. Helpful when a team member replies, but rarely required.

Every other field is a question about whether the customer will bother to finish the form. Ask only what you will actually read.

Why do shorter forms get more replies?

Each field is a decision the person has to make. Choosing a category, writing a subject line and finding a phone number all add friction, and friction is the most common reason someone closes a form without sending it. A form with two fields asks less of the customer than one with eight, so fewer people abandon it halfway through.

Shorter forms also produce cleaner messages. A focused text box invites a sentence about the problem. A long form invites a list of unrelated fragments, which takes longer to read and sort. Start short, and add a field only when a specific decision depends on it.

How do you keep a public form from being abused?

Public forms attract spam and bots, so protect them from the start. Escuta Produto uses several layers. Allowed origins mean only the sites you list can submit through the widget. Rate limiting allows ten requests per minute per IP and product. A hidden honeypot field catches bots that fill in every input, and size limits cap the body. The API returns clear status codes when a request breaks a rule, including 403 for an origin that is not allowed and 429 for too many requests.

Set the allowed origins first, because that blocks most misuse without any effort from real customers. The guide on protecting a feedback form from spam covers the rest of the checklist.

Adding a form with Escuta Produto's entry points

Escuta Produto gives you the embedded and hosted forms out of the box. Add the widget script with your product key. Any element with the attribute data-escuta-open opens the form with its type already chosen, such as data-escuta-open="bug". You can set the color and the position to match your site. For a standalone link, share /f/your-product-slug with a language parameter such as lang=en or lang=pt, and prefill the email with the email parameter when you know who is writing.

The widget documentation covers each option, and the hosted page documentation explains the link format. For wording the button, read what a feedback button should say, and for spam limits read how to protect a feedback form from spam.