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

Steve Coast steve at asklater.com
Fri May 27 18:26:51 BST 2011



On 5/27/2011 1:02 AM, Kai Krueger wrote:
> 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?

Pretty simple - you don't get any consensus therefore the data is pretty 
meaningless. If you get 50% of people saying there should be a big map 
on the front page and 50% say no map. What are you supposed to do? It 
will just randomize you.

>
> 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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>>> Strategic at openstreetmap.org
>>> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/strategic
>>>
>
>



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