Are you really your own worst critic? Kumquat, a tool that lets you design and solicit your own performance reviews on the areas you’re interested in from the people from whom you need feedback, will help you find out for sure.

Who needs a tool like Kumquat? Perhaps you’re self-employed, work solo, or do consulting on the side. Maybe you don’t get the valuable information from your current employer you need to make improvements in your performance or maybe you want timely evaluation of specific project rather than waiting for your annual review. If you feel like you could use more feedback from clients, customers, co-workers, or even people in your life with titles that start with letters other than “c”, Kumquat may be just the thing.

Kumquat’s interface is both attractive and easy to use. Each step is clear, whether you’re soliciting reviews or reviewing someone. Rating is on a scale of 0-5, but as a reviewer you can slide the score to any tenth of a point in between, from 0.1 to 4.9, and each question also includes a place for comments. As a “reviewee”, results are averaged for you, though you can also view each response individually, and a .pdf of your results is automatically created for you as well. When you solicit reviews you decide if your (up to 5) reviewers can see the other folks you’ve asked for a review and whether they will respond anonymously. Each reviewer is solicited through email–either a “less stuffy” or “more stuffy” form message or one you write yourself.

It’s nice that you can customize the message you send to reviewers, but I’d love to see more customization of questions available. Right now you’re limited to some broad questions like “how close did I come to meeting your expectations?” (pretty clear) or “how would you rate the value of this effort?” (huh?) You can add more specific comments to each question, but there’s not an option to create your own questions–hopefully that’s something in the works.

Kumquat is currently in limited release, so you might not be able to get an account just yet. (I’m not special, I just happened to read a post about Kumquat over at Read/WriteWeb at exactly the right moment.) If you’re interested though, they do have several ways to put yourself on the list when accounts are available.  If you’re really, really interested you are able to create an account if you fill out a review for someone, so we may be able to figure something out….