In many tech conferences, attendees are invited to rate the talk and/or the speaker from 1 to 5 stars. This type of ratings is interesting but has a few drawbacks.
The discussion started as a twitter thread with this french proposition.
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As a speaker, if you get a 1/5, you don’t always know why (and what to improve).
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As a speaker, if you get 5/5, you may think the audience liked the talk for the demos while they actually liked the diagrams explanations.
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As an attendee, you’re looking for talks to watch on YouTube. How do you chose between 10 talks that have a 4.5/5 rate?
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As a conf organizer, how do you know why this speaker/talk was liked or not?
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…
A different approach would be to provide (as an app/website) a bingo grid with ready to use feedbacks. Examples in english would be:
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I learn something
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Too fast
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Very interesting
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FUN!
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I loved the demos
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Hard to understand
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A bit boring
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I understood absolutely nothing
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Not deep enough
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Not enough demos/examples
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Too complicated
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Best talk ever
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…
And the list goes on.
I think each conference could come up with it’s own grid (variation on language obviously but also according to types of talks).
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Would a 3x3 grid or 4x4 be enough?
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Could we allow the speaker to provide a complimentary row of feedbacks like:
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I liked the first part about X
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The demo about Y was not very production ready
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The slide deck was ugly
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How can we create some kind of hall of fame? (most interesting talk, best demos…)
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Should we try to elaborate a rate from the grid?
What do you think?
Yes, I've noticed if you don't remind the audience to vote, they usually are less inclined to do so. +1 for an entertaining experience.
What I have seen working for long conferences (>45min) is a sli.do shared by QR code. It helps people interact because they find it funny to ask questions, especially in an anonymous way. Speaker would make 2~3 sli.do breaks to answer top 3 best graded questions.
And also, sli.do has a survey mode.
Thing is, sli.do has to be created conference by conference, speaker by speaker, not at a whole global conference scale. (I thought about that because it can be used as a source of inspiration)