[Strategic] User feedback or What does the community want / miss / annoy

[Kai Krueger]

Hello,

as part of the osm.org frontpage reorganisation discussions, it seems to 
be important to understand better what the current problems are with the 
page and what are its the aims? This would then allow those implementing 
any changes to make better decisions of how to improve things.

In addition to usability testing that some are currently doing, it would 
possibly be good to gather some more statistics of what people want to 
do with the homepage, what is currently missing and what bothers people 
most with the current design.

One way to do this is to collect feedback from a large sample of users / 
visitors and hear what they would think would be an improvement to the 
website.

A while back, during one of the previous iterations of "Frontpage 
design", SteveC (?) set up a user feedback system on uservoice[1] to 
collect such statistics. A number of people disliked this idea quite 
strongly, up to the point of childishly and deliberately posting silly 
suggestions to "prove" how stupid the feedback gained would be, but it 
is one way of "asking the community" and imho it is a lot better / more 
methodical than just posting such questions on the mailing list.

I would thus like to suggest to add such a feedback mechanism onto the 
homepage for a while to get a decent feeling for what the community 
wants from the webpage and see if any of it can be implemented.

In order for this to work, everyone has to be very clear that this would 
be simply a big wish list with a voting system to  try and understand 
the wishes of the community. This would include
a) that developers acknowledge that these are genuine wishes from users 
and can live with criticism of the current system
b) that users are very clear that things won't magically be implemented 
just because it is at the top of this wish list.

Such a ranked list could help decisions of where to invest resources 
(both server / monetary and more importantly development time) to a 
maximum effect. Many/most of the suggestions will likely never be 
implemented. Either because it would take to much effort to implement or 
because osmf might decide it is not desirable or does not fit in with 
its strategic goals. But again, as long as everyone acknowledges that 
these are no more than wishes, it can be a valuable statistical resource 
in addition to any others for future decisions.

A further concern in the past has been to not wanting to rely on 
external services (which uservoice was). This could be overcome by 
running a similar service on osmf hardware. For example, one possibility 
would be to have a second instance of OSQA e.g. at feedback.osm.org.

Thoughts (and flames ;-))?

Kai





[1] http://osm.uservoice.com/forums/41047-general