11 posts tagged “feedback”

[The following was written for the 2008 post-SxSW survey.  I'm posting it here not only because many people I talked to echoed the same sentiments but also because it exceed the form's maximum allowed length.  Yes, I'm verbose about things I'm passionate about. Go figure.]

This year was probably the worst SxSW for me in the many years I've been coming since 1989.  Most of it, I think, can boiled down what seemed to be massive awkward sudden growth in attendance which had two marked effects:

• Overcrowding and "denial of experience"
• Dilution of the serendipitous, memorable and opportune encounters and experiences from past years

In previous years, even the most packed panels had room for you to stand or sit on the floor.  Official parties were filled with interesting people and you could get to the bar.  And the best part, you could sit in one of two places and see within a fairly short time everyone you wanted to see.  Previous years were very much about unplanned social, business-related and educational serendipity.

This year, you had to plan things out well in advance, get into panels and parties as early as you could and then hope like hell that you were in a spot where you could hear or that you knew anyone.  And unlike all previous years, there was no central place to go and "be".  You could wander through the convention center for hours without seeing a single person you knew.

So the drastic increase in attendance, combined with the geographic dispersion of the conference rooms created what felt like a significant dilution of the entire experience and all of the things that made SxSW a must-attend even in the past.  At the same time, the massive crowds made any official party or must-see panel a "better off doing something else" event.  And that's really a shame.

So though there was little we could do about what happened inside of the convention center, we adapted outside of the convention center. The biggest success, in my opinion, this year is the same as last year: Twitter.  Thanks to Twitter, we could easily connect with friends, colleagues and others, know where the people we cared to see were and know which parties to avoid like the plague because the line was too long or the bar was out of Shiner. :-)

The most rewarding thing that fell out of all of the negatives this year was that we discovered the power of Twitter for creating our OWN parties, meetings and core conversations outside of the convention center. It only took a tweets from a handful of people converging on the same place for an unplanned party to immediately form where the bar was easily accessible, you didn't feel like you were in a cattle run and you didn't have to scream to hold a conversation.

Ideas for improvement

As far as solutions go, I can only offer a few possible ideas that would have made my experience better:

• Concentrate the locations of the panel rooms

    I've now seen parts of the convention center I never knew existed. That's not a good thing.  And if you can keep them on one floor, all the better.

• Create and/or promote a centralized space for people to gather

    This usually just falls out of a centralization of panel rooms since lots of people sit on the floow in the hallways, but you may want to go even further next year in creating and actively promoting a comfortable free-space (one indoor and one outdoor) for geeks to hang out, talk and meet one another.  It should either be central, close to high-traffic walkways (for high circulation and exposure) or be very attractive for one reason or another.  Creating a isolated space in the far corner of the convention center won't be used as you would expect unless there's something that draws people there.

• Lose the "core conversations"
  

    Originally, I was going to add "or make them work".  However, I'm not sure that that's even possible.  The conversations we used to have in the hallway were great just as they were.  It's impossible to have a conversation with 250 people who are straining to hear and that problem certainly contributed to the beyond-capacity regular panels as people would leave and camp out at the back door of a regular panel.  In the end, there just seemed to be less viable options when it came time to go to a panel.  (Again, I will readily admit, I am late to everything, but that was always fine in past years as you could still find room in the panel if not a chair).

• Station volunteer "ushers"

    I am quite sure that a number of the overflowing panels actually had room inside but people tend to stack up at the entrance in a standing-room-only situation.  To counter this, station a voluteer right inside the door for 15 minutes or so at the beginning of the panel to nicely ask people to migrate inwards and find a place to stand or sit.

I'm sure I will come back to SxSW next year not only because it's a hard habit to break but also to see if, perhaps, things change and the magic returns.  However, I have to say that if not, I am afraid that SxSW may lose its status as a "permanent holiday" that gets blocked off whenever I buy a new calendar.

Following up on my previous post, what's wrong with this picture? (The red lines are obviously your hint...)

Is anyone else bothered by this or is it just me?

Just a disclaimer: I work at Six Apart and I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE COMET!  However, I'm not a Comet insider, as I work in a different part of our massively small company.  Below is one in a collection of posts containing my thoughts about (Not)Comet.  Did I mention how much I love Comet?

When will the miracles and amazement cease?!  I just went over to my published blog, copied some text and then pasted it into the compose screen and -- wouldn't you know -- the styles were preserved!!

Holy crap, that's unheard of in a web app...  Comet team you make me weep...

On the flip side, it does seem that sometimes I can't turn a style (like bold or italics) off no matter what I do.  try copy/pasting italicized text into a new compose screen and see if you can write in anything other than italics...

That aside, awesome work...

Just a disclaimer: I work at Six Apart and I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE COMET!  However, I'm not a Comet insider, as I work in a different part of our massively small company.  Below is one in a collection of posts containing my thoughts about (Not)Comet.  Did I mention how much I love Comet?

Oh my God how I love adding things to collections.  Click, move mouse, shift-click, Add to collection, check box, zappity-zing, your done!  And I'm intrigued that they are top level objects  in the URL hierarchy.  I wonder what happens if I call one "blog" ... Hmmm.... 

Now you know what I'm going to ask for, don't you, dear Comet team?

* Ability to order the assets in a set -- errrm, I mean collection.
* Ability to replace the default collections icon with a photo/asset icon from the collection
* Ability to specify a description (excerpt/caption/what have you)
* Collection comments!
* Ability to edit the name after creation

Fun!

Just a disclaimer: I work at Six Apart and I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE COMET!  However, I'm not a Comet insider, as I work in a different part of our massively small company.  Below is one in a collection of posts containing my thoughts about (Not)Comet.  Did I mention how much I love Comet?

When surfing through my friends' latest, I noticed something which felt a bit odd:  Navigation between asset types is very different between the posts page and the pages of the other media types.

Let me see if I can explain this nuance...

When you click from your blog to your "Friends" page, you see their latest posts in the center content (see above picture).  On the sidebar, below your profile, you see the latest photos (with a link to the friends photos page -- shown at right) and way down the page you see Books, Music, etc (with respective links).

In comparison, on the Friends Photos page, you see photos in the center and then no posts, music or books on the sidebar.  You are instead given a nav right below the title and above the photos that allows you to surf other assets.

As you navigate to non-post assets the nav nicely persists and the breadcrumb changes to show your current location.  But when you click on posts, the nav disappears and the breadcrumb loses the last element to become something like "Blog name >> USERNAME'S Friends" as seen below.

This nav/breadcrumb inconsistency destroys the interaction flow between assets and seems to place a higher precedence on posts in the asset hierarchy as the default asset type. 

The nav, breadcrumb and Organize inconsistencies aside, I can certainly understand the thinking here.  On LJ, people love reading posts on their Friends page, so posts should be the default asset type and right there ready to read without any extra clicks. However, it seems particularly strange given the low priority of posts in the Organize screen (shown at right) and may, in fact, be the wrong choice for people like rabid photobloggers who care more about their friends photos than what they actually have to say.

More important, I think that by having a default asset type we're missing a golden opportunity.

The Friends Portal page

(*ahem* Puts on best Rod Serling voice)

Imagine if you will a Friends page that contains, at a glance, all of your friend's latest assets regardless of type.  In a center-content stream you see posts, photos, music, books, movies and anything else that we can think up in the future.  Each item would display a link (in addition to the other things like username, date and comment count) indicating its type through which you could go to that asset type page (e.g. the friends' photos page).   At the top of the page you have a nav like the first one above with all of the asset types linked to pages containing only that asset type.  This Friends page view might be called the Friends stream.

In addition to all of the asset types, the nav would also contain an item labelled "show in groups" (or something) which would change the display of the page to be grouped by asset type: a section of posts with only user icons and titles (for brevity), a group of photos, a group for books, etc...  This might be called the Friends portal or, in what would certainly become the Marketing Department's worst nightmare, the Frortal.  (I said it first!  Bite me, Anil.)

The display of this page would be persistent.  That is to say that if you clicked on the Frortal and then navigated away, when you come back to your friends page, that view would be shown and vice versa.  In this way, the user's choice is seamlessly persistent and will usually be the right choice for the user.

In Frummary

In my view, this sort of design makes navigation between elements extremely easy and offers two equally interesting ways to represents ALL of your friends' latest assets without the weird inequity between asset types.  To ease the loss of one click access to an LJ-style friends page (with only posts), the assets types could be listed below the "Friends" link on the sidebar of your blog so that you can go straight to a particular asset type (a good thing all around  anyway if you ask me).

Now, this is in no way a slam on or slight against our fantastic Design/UI group and all of the people who have been working tirelessly on the Comet team.  They developed this entire massive app, literally from the ground up, which if you've never done such a thing you should know that it is a task of Herculean proportions.   In fact, I'm sure that what I've written above has already been brought up in design meetings and either shot full of holes (as my hare-brained ideas so often are) or postponed to a v2 release.

Still, in case perhaps no one thought of it, I thought that I should write it up. 

What say ye, O mighty Comet team?

A side note

This post alone has convinced me of the incredible usefulness and superiority of ySIWYG over any other posting interface mode or mechanism.  It simply did what I needed it to do and then got the hell out of the way.  Who do I have to bribe to get this into Movable Type?

Just yesterday, I mentioned that the response page after submitting feedback caused me inadvertently not submit my feedback

Today, that is fixed and it was immediately very clear to me what was going on.  Yay Comet team!!

Now if only I didn't have to fill in my email address every time I submit feedback....   (I've already submitted that -- individually so that it can be tracked...)

Testing my second(!) answer to the question of the day....

Just a disclaimer: I work at Six Apart and I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE COMET!  However, I'm as unfamiliar with it as you are, since I work on a different team.  Below is a collection of my noodling, questions that I'm searching for answers on and things I personally would like to see for my own use.

Some questions/thoughts re: Com-ay:

• What do I do with a post like this?  Should I break it up into individual Feedback items for submission?  Should I just post a single link in a feedback submission?
• Is there a preview button for comments forthcoming?  One of the most heinous things about  blogs created by another piece of software is the inability to preview your comment before you post it leading invariably to needless followups.
• Is there a way to see everything with a particular tag system-wide?
• There is no indication on the Connection page  who is a friend or family so you have to click through each one to find out.   Would be made easier with a "Contacts" item on the left like All, Friends, and Family.
• It would be great to have friends and family icons (and blogs?) displayed differently anywhere they appear, including in other friend's friend lists.  This would make the process of "friend surfing/collecting" much easier for new people.
• The "hover, wait, mouse down to click small view profile link" dance on user icons isn't fun. 
  
• Would also love some real URLs like http://www.notcomet.com/connect/friends http://www.notcomet.com/connect/family http://www.notcomet.com/connect/all http://www.notcomet.com/connect/contacts instead http://www.notcomet.com/connect#ugroup_id:10 and http://www.notcomet.com/connect#ugroup_id:11
• When you view a contacts profile from the Connect page, the page jumps back to the top which puts the last row of your contacts below the fold of the page.  What's worse, space is apparently trapped by the javascript, so you can't use it to scroll back to the bottom.
• Would be great to have a batch editing mode (or anything faster) for friends instead of having to click through to each one to change their status.
• You can add yourself as a connection.  I was afraid to remove myself, but the pain was only momentary.
• I love my friends page.  But I really love my friends' friend's pages.  What a great way to find new and interesting friends...
• I love the "you're about to navigate away from the compose page warning".   Every web app should have this.
• I love how easy it is to create posts in Comet, however I still have not figured out exactly how those image alignment buttons work.  Still, I usually end up with what I want somehow...
  
• I verily dislike the pre-filled "http://" in the add link dialog in the WYSIWYG editor because it forces me to use my Trackpad to remove it before pasting a URL.  Can't we just handle that gracefully adding it if needed?
• You can answer the Question of the Day twice!
• Is there a way to upload a text file? Or anything other than a photo?
• Would be wonderful to be able to import Flickr pictures by username.
• Would be wonderful to be able to import MORE pictures from Flickr besides the last N (too lazy at this point to count how many show up)
• I love the fact that all of the metadata (title, tags, etc) gets pulled over when I import from Flickr.
  
• At the sametime, it was quite disconcerting when someone else's metadata got pulled over when I pulled in a few of theirs (whereupon it looked like I was calling myself a "hottie"
• Sure would love a desktop uploader for photos
• It's disappointing that if you start a long entry such as this and save it as draft, that you can't update the timestamp when you publish it for others so that it's at the top of your blog.
• It wasn't clear to me on the Design page that you had to pick both a layout and design in order for it to take effect when you save.   My assumption was that I was changing just one of them.
  
• I hate the fact that I just got an Entourage reminder that SxSW starts in 14 minutes.
  

A longer item about photos pages

Having both a photo page and a blog entry about that photo is confusing in the case where you are uploading a number of photos in order to blog about them in one post or one where you simply want to blog about a single photo.

What seems to be happening pretty regularly is that the conversation gets split between the two pages.  Some people click through to see the larger image and then leave a comment, other people leave it on the original blog entry.

What's more, people who only see the photo page with no context provided by the post are missing out a lot.  The only thing I can do is to put a link on the photo page to the blog entry.  Perhaps this could be automated?  Or perhaps better, photos could be marked as private (or let's call it no-publish-photo-page) but subsequently included into blog entries?

Of course, perhaps I'm just Using Comet All Wrong.  Either way, I love it...  I can't wait to read the help docs!  :-)

I've submitted a couple of feedback items and only just now realized that, due to the way the feedback submission page is laid out, I didn't actually submit my feedback. 

The idea of submitting a form only to be asked whether you want to cancel your submission is weird enough (especially when your feedback isn't shown on the screen like in a preview), but to require a user to confirm ("Yes go ahead and do what I already asked you to do")  by clicking a submission button on the right is going to cause a lot of feedback to never reach us.

Looking at the feedback URL, I realize that this may not be our ball of wax to fix, but I worry that we're going to be losing a lot of feedback because the options after submitting it are so completely different than anything else on the web and not intuitive at all.