Your deck's best feedback is the questions it gets.
Ask someone for feedback on your deck and you will get "looks good" or silence. It is not that people have no opinions. Writing feedback is work, and nobody owes you that work.
Questions are different. A reader asks a question because they need the answer to keep going. They ask it unprompted, about one specific thing, at the moment they got stuck. That makes every question two things at once: something to answer now, and a precise note about a page that did not do its job. This post is about treating questions that way.
Why are questions better than feedback?
Feedback is a summary written after the fact and filtered through politeness. A question is raw. It tells you exactly what the reader expected to find and did not.
Look at what a single question gives you:
- A location. It came from one page, often from one line on it.
- A gap. Something the reader needed was missing, buried or unclear.
- A priority. It came from someone reading to make a decision, not someone you asked for a favour.
A feedback form rarely gives you all three. A question usually does.
Where should readers ask?
On the page they are reading, privately.
When the only way to ask is a reply email, two things go wrong. Fewer people ask, because writing an email about slide 4 means describing slide 4 first. And the questions that do arrive lose their context: "what did you mean in the rollout part?" Which page? Which version? The English deck or the Turkish one?
A question asked on the page keeps all of that. In Decktrace, it is saved with the page, the version and the language it was asked in, and only the reader and the deck owner see it. Other readers of the same link see the page with nothing on it, so nobody has to ask in front of an audience. You get an email for each new question, and a reader who verifies their email gets an email when you answer.
How should you answer?
Quickly, briefly and next to the page. Take Brightlane's proposal for Harrow Retail. On page 4, the rollout plan, Olivia Bennett asked:
Does week one need our IT team, or is the setup on your side?
A good answer is two sentences:
Setup in week one is on our side. Your IT team joins in week two, for about half a day, to connect single sign-on.
Answer the question that was asked. Resist the urge to attach three case studies and a calendar link. Reply in the language the question came in, and do it the same working day if you can, because a reader with an open question is a reader on hold. Since the thread stays on page 4, Olivia finds the answer next to the plan when she comes back, and anyone on your team can see what was promised.
What does a question tell you about the page?
Later that day, another reader of the same link asked on page 4 whether week one would need time from IT. One question might be about the reader. Two similar questions on the same page are about the page.
Read as notes on the deck, questions tend to fall into three kinds:
- The answer is there, but buried. The reader asks for something the page states in its fifth bullet. Move it up.
- The answer is missing. The page assumes something the reader cannot know, like who does the work in week one. Add it.
- The words get in the way. The question asks what a term means. Replace the term, or explain it where it first appears.
Sort questions by page across all your readers, not by reader. A page that collects questions from several people is the first page to fix.
How do questions become the next version?
Make the change on the page the questions came from, and keep it small. For Brightlane, that is one new line on the rollout page: setup by Brightlane in week one, your IT team for about half a day in week two. The rest of the page stays as it was.
Publish it on the same link. Readers who come back see the new page. Earlier threads stay attached to the version they were asked on, so you can still see the page as Olivia saw it. Then watch the next round. If nobody asks about week one again, the page now does its job.
This is the loop a deck should run on: share it, see how it is read, answer what people ask and improve the page. When you answer a reader's question, Decktrace suggests where that answer belongs in the deck and drafts the addition as a Next version card. You edit it, approve it and publish it as a new version. When a later reader asks something similar, your earlier answer is offered as a starting point for the reply. Nothing is sent or published until you choose.
What if nobody asks anything?
Silence is not approval. Often it just means asking felt like effort. Make it easier:
- Say in your email that questions are welcome on any page, and that you will answer there.
- Look at the pages where readers stopped or stayed a long time. Those are good places to look for a question nobody wrote down.
- In your follow-up, ask one specific question yourself, such as "Did the rollout page answer who does what in week one?" A specific question gets a specific answer.
Turn your next questions into a better deck
- Tell readers they can ask on any page, privately.
- Answer the same working day, next to the page, in the reader's language.
- Answer the question that was asked, in two or three sentences.
- Group questions by page across readers, not by reader.
- Sort each one: buried, missing or unclear.
- Make one small change per page and publish it to the same link.
- Check whether the questions stop after the change.