In the past we’ve gather feedback from two mechanisms: the user forums, and direct mail. To be honest, neither way has worked very well for us.
The forums generated a lot of ideas but they were difficult to keep up with, as there were no built-in mechanisms for tracking an idea’s popularity, and discussions were so scattered. Plus we didn’t see these forums primarily as a way for users to communicate with us – we saw them more as a place for users to communicate with each other.
Mail, on the other hand, is pretty hopeless because it’s not transparent to others. A lot of people will make the same suggestion, but none of those peple will ever see each other’s ideas.
Today we’re introducing a new user feedback system called UserVoice which we hope will make life better for you and for us!
UserVoice builds a new kind of forum that is optimized for gathering user feedback and acting on it. The idea is simple: you submit ideas and vote up the best ones. Popular ideas float to the top, so we at Smart.fm can easily respond to them. You have a limited number of points to use (ten points in each forum), which makes you focus only on the ideas really worth implementing. We have limited developer resources here, so it’s important we only build stuff that the community really needs.
You might be wondering, “What happens when I run out of votes?” When that happens, you can change your votes by clicking on them. This allows you to move your points around. Also when ideas get completed or deleted, you’ll get your votes back. (You’ll also get an email when this happens.)
Currently we have three UserVoice forums each for both English and Japanese: Report Bugs, Suggest Ideas, and Learning App Alpha Feedback.
The purpose of each forum is pretty self-explanatory. “Report Bugs” is only for reporting bugs. “Suggest Ideas” is for feature requests and recommended changes. And “Learning App Alpha Feedback” is for providing feedback for the new learning apps. (Note: The new learning apps are currently only available for a small group of alpha users. We will open them up to a large group of beta testers very soon.)
The important point to make about UserVoice forums is that each forum is designed for gathering feedback around a certain area. They’re not general discussion areas. The old user forums were a place for users to talk to each other, ask questions, and also suggest new ideas. This kind of general discussion area has it benefits, but it really prevents any kind of systematic evaluation of ideas. So we ask that you please don’t use the UserVoice forums for casual discussions. For these forums to work, topics need to stay focused on specific bug reports and feature requests.
One important note about the old forums: we will keep them open one more week, and then next Monday (October 12th), we’ll archive them as read-only. They’ll be accessible until the site re-launch, but after that point they’ll be permanently retired. We don’t plan on maintaining them indefinitely.
We’re excited about using the new UserVoice forums as a way to more directly engage all of you in making Smart.fm a better service. If the forums are well received, I think you’ll see the staff here also use them for submitting our own ideas, which you can then vote on.
The goal is to create a transparent mechanism where all of us – users and staff alike – can see what we all want and help make it happen.
UserVoice sounds like a great idea, although i do have one question.
If your retiring the user forums completely, and we can’t have general discussion in the UserVoice forums, how are we supposed to have general group discussions? We have plenty of discussions on there that don’t fit into bug reports or feature suggestions and if the old forums are removed the only way you could post these questions or discussion topics would be to post it in a blog, which only people who are following you would ever see so the chances are your question may never get answered.
Once the Forums are set to read only, they can’t really take up much in the way of resources. Wouldn’t hurt to let them linger a little bit would it?
There’s a lot in there.
This sounds like a great way to gather user feedback, but why eliminate the general forums? Will there be new general discussion forums put up with the new site? I can understand and agree with the idea of keeping the feedback forums free of general discussion, but if people don’t have a place to have these types of conversations, I think the feedback forums will wind up getting flooded with general discussion. Even if it’s to only help keep the feedback forums clean, I think there should still be a place for users to have general discussions.
Indeed, a place where group lists can be coordinated. Not that that happened on this forum…
Agree with stripmahjong and Lord_Azael. UserVoice is a great service though for what it does, but we still need general forums.
If it comes to it, we could just make our own forum. I know there a several user-forum regulars here who would use them, the only problem is letting regular users know about it so it actually gets some use…
@russ > _we didn’t see these forums primarily as a way for users to communicate with us –- we saw them more as a place for users to communicate with each other._
Take a look at these forum names:
・ English Feedback/英語でのフィードバック
・ smart.fm 全般について(モバイル版、Podcast含む）
・ ご質問
・ エラー・不具合について
・ 感想・ご意見
・ 機能追加リクエスト
With names like that, you can hardly blame users for thinking that the forums were meant for communication with the smart.fm team.
I’ve always thought it would be a good idea to have a forum for each language – at least English, Japanese, and Chinese – where native speakers could chat and people learning the language could attempt to chat. As for taking the forums down entirely I don’t really approve, even though I don’t really use the forums… forums are parts of almost every big site there is, and they’re not really hard to maintain. They promote user activity and they don’t even have to be moderated… or at least I’d hope forums on a site like this wouldn’t have to be moderated. Besides, without forums, how are you supposed to make friends on this site?
Hi, paulkrause88, you are right completely, in your own way that is.
I remember the days that User Forum was once being named “Feedback” for long period. Read this topic if you know Japanese. While many vocal people discussed the topic above with the iKnow! (smart.fm on today) guys, eventually “Feedback” turned to change its name into “User Forum.” And now they’ve given re-birth to UserVoice. Methinks it will be after all real feedback. What a surprise, we went back where it used to be.
I believe that UserVoice could be good space to everyone.
Hi everyone,
Having a General Discussions forum within UserVoice certainly makes sense, even if you don’t vote general topics up and down. So I just added one here:
http://feedback.smart.fm/pages/30622-general-discussions
We’ll add a footer link to that one too just a little later.
we rock!
@russ Thanks for adding the General Chat section, although i note that without the footer link its gotten no use yet the old user forum still does. I get the feeling once it goes to read-only a lot of people who don’t read this blog will have no idea what has happened or why, and worse still probably won’t know where to ask or find out.
But leaving that aside i have some questions/problems with the UserVoice General discussion forum. Mainly, each user has 10 votes and you need to spend at least 1 vote to post anything. Which means (given that the users cannot decide if something on there has been “completed” and we get our points back) can only post 10 topics unless an admin “completes” a thread and we get our points back.
Then there is the fact that actual comments on posts made seem to make no effect on where a suggestion ends up on the lineup, only votes count. Which means if we end up with a decent amount of ’suggestions’, and judging by the old forums, we will, we then have to vote away our precious points just to get it read by people so we can get an answer.
The search features we all desperately wanted are still not there. I don’t mean to provoke or offend, but it seems to me that the Forums have been taken from a usable (if feature-lacking) section of the site, to something still usable but significantly more restricted.
Is this going to be the permanent “general discussion” forum? Can we expect something more useful in the future? Will we have to band together and create our own forum so we can actually talk to each other in a useful way?
@Lord_Azael, for reasons you and others have pointed out, UserVoice does not work well for general discussion, so we’ve removed that area. We’re considering other approaches for a general discussion area and will give everyone an update in a few weeks time.
After the latest change, I can not do iKnow and others as well.If Smart.fm listened Japanese users voice or feedback, you will not lose Japanese users.
I have seen several smart.fm users at alc website and they all say the latest change is never ever Japanese users friendly change. If your targetied users are mainly native English speakers, you will never ever make success in Japan. St. Paul