Feedback for Review Basics Feedback Suite

Review Basics is a new feedback gathering platform that allows professionals throughout industry to share ideas and provide reviews to a wide variety of content. Besides providing a universal set of review tools RB offers customized solutions targeted at specific markets and industry sectors.

The backbone of the RB is the utilization of Flash and AJAX interactive tools that allows users great flexibility in communication, collaboration and creativity. The service can be utilized over a broad spectrum of solution oriented platforms including; creative & design solutions, opinion research solutions, film and editing applications and legal documentation development.

This cool service can process RTF, MS Word, PPT, PDF, FLV, JPG, GIF and PNG formatted data, and the company site states that new types are being added continuously. One thing I really like is that the company has left an email link so that potential users can ask for formats not currently supported.

The people at RB have really thought this product through. The UI walk-through is both informative and perceptive, and each of the tools described is an attempt to put flexibility, power and functionality into the user's hands. For a beta, a good deal of effort has already gone into making RB top drawer. The down side is that the service needs some additional elements to take it to the top of the Web 2.0 heap. 

What it needs!

Any beta is going to be lacking some things, in the case of RB the first noticeable thing is speed. The UI is quick with most functions but the transition into and out of edit mode it slow. Audio feedback would be much more efficient in some cases, as any annotation software could apply text bubbles as effectively. A scalable rating slide would also be very effective to the basic UI, and there needs to be one heck of a lot more application tools in the toolbox. Even the smileys are deficient for a service this sharp. Review Basics can certainly add more diverse ways to express feelings and emotions.  

I hate even criticizing such a nicely developed tool, but anyone who created something this nice will surely be thinking about anything a user might suggest. The upload of documents, images and even video is really simple in RB, but there needs to be a way to capture video as well in my opinion. At least an embed function would be very helpful, unless I just missed it.

Review Basics has the makings of something really special and with some user feedback and upgrading this will be a very useful tool, especially to small business. Some system of evaluation and aggregation needs to be included in this package. This would help collaborators in establishing a baseline or goal that editors could strive towards, rather than a simple running commentary. If Review Basics can hurdle those little obstacles they will have something very special for many small niches in my view. I know I seem harsh, but the innovators set the bar by demonstrating what they are capable of.