Collecting feedback in-product is a good way to get started with direct user feedback. Examples of in-product feedback are grading a specific view or action, giving a thumbs up or down, or sending a happy or sad smiley face.

Collecting in-product feedback has the following advantages:

• It is one of the easiest ways for customers to give feedback, taking virtually none of their time.
• Due to the non-intrusiveness of this approach, a larger group of users might choose to respond.
• Recorded feedback can be context-aware.
• When recording a grade, smiley face, or thumbs up or down for feedback, an application can also record the current state and most recent user activities and send all of that along with the user feedback. This makes a single click by the user much more valuable than it seems at first sight. It allows quick insights into the most loved and most hated parts of an application.
• Finally, allowing in-product feedback makes the user feel heard and listened to.

The disadvantage of this type of feedback is that it can be too much to analyze in detail. Also, since the results are often anonymized, it is not possible to follow up on feedback. This makes it hard to understand why a user was satisfied or dissatisfied with a screen. Sometimes this is countered by adding a checkbox under the feedback box stating something like: "I give one-time permission to be contacted about this subject".

For understanding the reasons for a user's feedback, other feedback mechanisms such as interviews or focus groups might be more appropriate.