Closing the loop
Focus areas
Systems thinking
Context
Google users share feedback for various reasons:
Reporting issues
Suggesting ideas
Expressing dissatisfaction
Seeking help
However, multiple independent studies revealed a recurring concern: users often feel their feedback goes into a void. This lack of acknowledgment leads to frustration, apathy, and ultimately, lower-quality feedback.
To address this, we set out to design a system that:
Acknowledges user effort.
Enables product teams to follow up for more clarity.
Redirects users to existing help resources.
Closes the loop by notifying users when their issue is resolved.
This required a deep dive into the entire feedback journey—from how users submit feedback to how product teams consume and act on it—so we could identify the right signals and touchpoints to communicate meaningfully with users.
Design brief
Design a system to close the feedback loop by acknowledging user input, enabling follow-ups, and delivering updates—through targeted touchpoints across the end-to-end feedback journey.
Guiding principles:
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Non-intrusive to avoid being spammy.
Orientation - the feedback journey
The foundation
Systems thinking
🔀 Approach
The highlight of this project was a deep analysis of the end-to-end feedback journey to identify key touchpoints and signals for initiating close-the-loop communication. I collaborated with engineering teams to understand the full lifecycle of a feedback report—from collection to bug status updates—and partnered with product teams to uncover use cases that required a reliable way to reconnect with users.
🎯 Outcome
This exercise helped narrow down a set of solutions mapped to different stages of the feedback journey:
Contextual help articles for real-time loop closure at the point of feedback.
A Feedback Tracking Page to give users visibility into the status of their submissions.
A Close-the-Loop Tool to help product teams follow up with users when needed.
Email Templates to streamline communication and maintain consistency in tone and messaging.
Help articles - real time loop closure
✨ Solution
Many users seeking help unintentionally submitted feedback that product teams couldn’t act on—resulting in a high volume of irrelevant feedback during triage. The ideal solution was to redirect these users to the appropriate help channels before they submitted their feedback. To achieve this, we introduced contextual help articles directly within the feedback flow, offering timely guidance and reducing unactionable submissions at the source.
📈 Impact
By surfacing contextual help, we achieved ~18% deflection of non-junk feedback reports across 12 products.
Feedback tracking page
✨ Solution
While a feedback page already existed, the close-the-loop initiative gave us an opportunity to redesign it into a more informative and user-centric experience. The updated page allowed users to view their submitted feedback, attached images, related help articles, and any future updates or resolutions tied to their feedback.
Experience it live:
MyFeedback page
🧐 Learnings
Gained a deep appreciation for Google’s unwavering commitment to accessibility across all public-facing surfaces.
Got hands-on exposure to Google’s internal illustration library and visual language system.
Discovered key differences between external user feedback and internal feedback from Googlers—each with its own nuance and value.
Close the loop configuration tool
✨ Solution
The Close-the-Loop configuration tool enabled product teams to select pre-defined email templates tailored to the issue types tagged in user feedback—making it easier to respond appropriately and efficiently.
🧐 Learnings
Closely collaborated with engineers to understand how user feedback was ingested, anonymized, and traced back to the original context.
Gained insight into the nuances of internal product nomenclature and its impact on how feedback was categorized and routed within the pipeline.
Email templates
✨ Solution
The pre-defined email templates gave product teams a valuable head start—allowing them to quickly select responses that were both standardized and contextually relevant to the user’s feedback. Designing these templates was particularly challenging due to Google’s strict privacy policies and accessibility standards. It required multiple iterations to ensure compliance, clarity, and a tone that felt helpful yet respectful, before they were finally approved for launch.
🎯 Outcome
The following templates were identified, validated with product teams, and designed:
Acknowledgement
Issue resolution / Idea implementation
Availability of new help content
Clarification of non-actionable feedback
Some of these responses were automated, while others were manually triggered on a case-by-case basis.
Conclusion
With this, we successfully established a system to close the loop with feedback givers. Looking ahead, there’s still work to be done in measuring long-term impact and validating the success of this initiative at scale.