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

Kai Krueger kakrueger at gmail.com
Fri May 27 09:02:16 BST 2011


On 05/27/2011 12:55 AM, SteveC wrote:
> Sounds like design by committee to me :-(
How exactly is "knowing what your users / the community wants" design by 
committee? How can having more information be bad in any decision process?

What and who does something with this information is where it could turn 
into "design by committee", but that is completely independent of if 
there is a feedback system or not.

Kai

> Steve
>
> stevecoast.com
>
> On May 26, 2011, at 21:12, Kai Krueger<kakrueger at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>>
>>
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>>




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