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

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 05/27/2011 06:12 AM, Kai Krueger wrote:
> 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.

Before that, it would be good to have a (attention marketing-speak) 
"mission statement" from which we could derive what kinds of people we 
want to please with our main page.

For example, I'm sure I could find a number of people who would say that 
our main page lacks the option to show aerial imagery (as compared to 
$COMMERCIAL_MAP_PROVIDER); to which our answer would clearly be "this 
page is intended to showcase the power of OSM maps and not that of a 
third-party imagery provider, so if you want aerial imagery, look 
elsewhere".

But this is an easy example; there will be others much less clear, and 
most along the well-known fault line of whether our target audience is 
(a) mostly mappers, (b) non-mappers whom we encourage to become mappers, 
or (c) the great unwashed^W^Wgeneral public.

You acknowledge that further down (very far down) in your posting when 
you say

 > 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.

I just think it would be good to have well-defined strategic goals to 
begin with, against which these suggestions can then be measured. That 
would make for a clearer process.

> 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.

The above paragraph contains the possible misconception that "the 
community" would use the feedback mechanism. It is just as likely that 
random visitors would; so if you do build such a mechanism, make sure to 
let people identify themselves ("I am a mapper/regular user/occasional 
visitor/first-time visitor" or something like that).

> 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.

The above paragraph contains the possible misconception that "the 
community" would use the feedback/voting mechanism and that we should do 
what "the community" wants. It is entirely possible that 65% of male 
respondents tell you they want more boobs on the front page; so you have 
to measure any responses you get against what the front page is 
*supposed* to do.

The front page is certainly not supposed to "please the maximum number 
of random people who happen to take part in a feedback/voting system". 
It is clear that results *must not* be taken at face value; they may be 
"genuine wishes from users" but they may not apply to what *we* want to 
achieve with the web site.

Bye
Frederik