What we do with your feedback

We receive feedback from users of the European Union website in four ways:

• Help us Improve form – we receive up to 3 000 comments through this form every week.
• Survey - we ask 1 in every 20 visitors who enter the site a number of short questions.
• Contact form - a feedback form where people can email us and receive a reply.
• User testing – we hold regular user testing on our website to get feedback on the 'live site' or on draft pages and sections we are working on. We also use other user research techniques such as field studies, paper prototyping and carding sorting.

All the comments and suggestions we receive are translated (machine translation) into languages we can read and then we analyse them. We look for recurring problems and make constant changes. This might mean adding a link, changing a link description or finding other ways of helping people to the information they are looking for.

So what changes have we made recently?

New pages

• We have updated our Your Life in the EU pages. Around 10-15% of our website visitors are looking for practical information about moving abroad, shopping, travel etc., so we wanted to make the path to this information as clear as possible.
• We have made the contact information clearer and put it in a box on all pages. We wanted users to have an easy way to phone the EU call centre or email if they were stuck and could not find an answer to their query. We also made the contact information for each EU institution clearer and we have added social media links. For example, on the European Parliament page, you have links to Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and other social media accounts.
• We have also restructured our Take Part pages , where we give links to the EU on social media (the list is growing!) and we also redesigned the prizes and competitions page.

What do we have in the pipeline?

We are constantly looking at ways of improving the europa.eu site and there are many changes underway.

Just a few examples:

• We are updating the map of the EU and the information on countries joining the EU. This is very popular information on the site and we know from our tests with users and the feedback we receive that we could do much better.
• We are still working on changes to make the homepage less cluttered. We will remove some features we know are not used that frequently by our visitors and we will try to highlight more clearly the top tasks (the main reasons visitors come to the site).
• We are continuing work to improve the Publications and documents section. Looking for EU documentation is complex and we are trying to simplify this section. We carried out a card-sorting test with a group of users to try to work out how best to organise this section.
• We are continuing to improve the structure of the 35 policy pages. We have already updated the texts in 23 languages but we are now looking at ways of improving the layout.
• We will launch a new section on Doing Business in the EU.
• Our translation team is already preparing translation of the site into Croatian as Croatia is due to join the EU next summer.

Should you wish to give us feedback on the site, please leave a comment in the survey box or contact us through our feedback form.

The team at one of our regular meetings to discuss user feedback: