Recently active ideas in Get Satisfaction tagged with interface

Every time I look at a discussion I'm participating in or my "dashboard" here on GetSatisfaction, I'm getting practically sick at the sight of all those sticky sweet cupcakes. I can practically /smell/ that cloying aroma of chocolate and imagine getting sticky fingers just looking at the page.

Could we have a little balance here? Please add some icons with cheese, sausage, nuts and fruit, and other edibles that may be liked by people who just hate all this sticky unhealthy sweetness!

Hi there,

see the following ideas I do have for improving your topic interface.



(Source: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/16751/gs-i...)
(As it is not possible to upload image in a way one can look at it (open it) at a reasonable resolution, I'll keep it uploading this way...hope you see the problem...)

Explanations:

Of course there should be also a clickable red button (or green one with a "+", to be consistent), when e.g. I'd not be follow the company "LinkedIn" yet.
Concerning this button, I have to add that I consciously used the term "customer of this company" instead of the verb "use", which is used by you "undifferentiated" for both products & companies on ones own "Your products & companies" site!

Concerning the "three answers" you might get shown the first answers with a (maybe AJAXified / ROR) pop-up button to move you to the next anchor. Somehow like with HTML anchors etc. (I'm not that sure about the the tech stuff, really. O.o)

The display of the position and company name under the picture and name of a person adds to the interaction (possibilities), what I think is of great value!

PS: Sorry for having to "abuse" the names of Ben and Steve.

Hi there,

I do have some new ideas. :D

1. You should be able to hide / collapse the "Active companies in Get Satisfaction right now" on the home page. It just bugs me. ;-) Maybe one could use the space (only when collapsed!) for something else. For example for suggested companies / products based on...whatever.
Another option would be to add a checkbox "show only products, you haven't added yet", which would provide real value to me, because I might want to check out new companies / products, but if 50% of the shown companies / products I already added, this is difficult.

2. Search / Dashboard related:
You should add buttons or something like that with the following options:
2.1. "Show unanswered threads you started" (no answers from anyone but maybe you)
2.2. "Show threads with no company answers" (only additions / questions / comments from other users or yourself)
2.3. "Show unsolved issues" (I'm not sure if I proposed this one before...)
2.4. "Show solved issues" (optional, maybe for the control freaks or if you know, you flagged something "solved" recently, which you want to review again. :))

3. Old issue: I still miss the possibility to add more details to your short profile.
3.1 Location could be more differentiated. Maybe linked to Plazes or GoogleMaps.
3.2. I can't even add my job title! (Maybe I can when adding a company? Didn't try it, but it should be possible even without adding it directly to Get Satisfaction!)

4. What comes to my mind concerning companies: If you REALLY want to maybe have every kind of company here, did you think about both the topic of complex problems (mechanical / technical issues maybe someone wants to discuss) and privacy (although I doubt some "oldfashioned" company will register here and talk about engineering here is highly unlikely anyway...), "the longterm vision", so to speak? Just want to add that, although I think you might have already thought that through.

5. Get Satisfaction should also keep track of the companies and products you added and/or edited, if possible. At least there should be sth. like "You added x companies and y products:" > company a | company b | product q | product r ...etc. (showing the boxes, as everytime) ...of course also inside your timeline on your Dashboard / Newsfeed.

Kind regards,

Phil
PS: I love your new, subtle interface improvements!! =)

Clicking "Inappropriate" by accident or curiosity is something that happened to me too. So I suggest either asking before putting the post under review, either allow to undo the action from the secondary dialog that opens for more info.

Separation of topics created by oneself and others in the personal dashboard

Hi there,

I do have a problem with the real information overload created by creating, answering and subsequently subscribing to all these topics, both to those self-created and to those from others. I did propose several measures against the mess already, but that's not enough.

You must have the possibility to separate the news in your dashboard at the most important and common position (from my point of view):

a) News in topics, that I created. (and maybe answered / commented too)
b) News in topics, that others created and I subscribed to. (and maybe answered / commented too)

So in this case, it isn't about answering, commenting or "voting" as the divider, it is about the question, who created the content in the first place.

Why is this so important?

I think I will remember the topics I subscribed to exactly and I know the ones created of course too. And will interact on these topics anyway, so it is often not about to find a single comment or comments at all (because I'd maybe reaally like (to only use) comments, they're so cute! ;-P), it is always centered around a certain topic.

The other point is, that even if I would be able to drill down the topics to some with a "My topics" search (which you'll soon be implementing, I'm sure. ;-)), it wouldn't help, if let's say I maybe forgot the important keywords or just think about the wrong ones.
(I assume that the topic wasn't created that long ago.)

The normal way, this one topic would get lost e.g. in the huge list of new activity on other topics created by me (if the topic I search is not created by me...). The new way, I could find the recent topic very quickly, as it'll show up immediately as the (almost) first item! This is of course correct also the other way 'round (maybe I'm not creating many topics, but mostly following and commenting.).

Hi there,

I'd like to really see buttons / the functionality for enlarging (and shrinking) of all the text fields (boxes?) here on GS, that are for starting a new topic or answering one (not including comments, which is discussed here (but doesn't include my idea)).

This is especially a point because of the new interface design on the companies home sites, as the text boxes there are really small.

Technically, this should be solved with a technique, that is basically also usable without a mouse. (I don't know the name of the language, but I know examples in the www, but don't find them currently...will add them soon...)

I would love to see my dashboard simplified. perhaps with a simple list of topics I've participated in, and a count next to it showing the # of replies since my last visit. Clicking a particular topic would then show the chronological participation ~for that topic~ that is currently splayed confusingly all over the place. You know, like opening folders for each topic.

Other ideas?

Hi Get Satisfaction team,

as I'm posting and doing a lot here, I see that the "Recent activity" feed / stream does confuse and overstrain me to a certain amount, so I'd like to propose some solutions:

1.) Make a filtering option, ideally on the left side with little checkboxes! :)
1.1. My activity (all activity except posts & comments) - hideable
1.2. My posts (questions / ideas / problems / discussions / answers) - hideable *
1.3. My comments - hideable

* maybe you could split that up into: "started threads" and "answers" too...

2.) Additionally make it possible to a) temporarily or b) permanently hide old(er) items
a) through a clickable triangle, which minimizes the post to only let the title be left visible.
b) through a little "x" or checkbox with a checkmark.

3.) Bonus idea: Make it possible to click on (in my case currently)
"You have started 18 topics.", so I get to my started threads with a click on the underlined part. (This addresses the little grey-bordered box on the left side of "Recent activity".)

Hi there,

it is a problem for me personally, that I can't change the company, when I'm starting a topic! I think that's stupid. Maybe I'm on the site of "Seesmic", but I want to write a question / idea to "Adobe" or "Newsgator", why can't I change the company to another one I did add to my dashboard?

I might have overseen another point again, but I'm happy to learn! :)

Hi there,

when I do search a product or topic or company, maybe I was wrong, when I used the "topic" standard option, as it doesn't seem to find company / product names.
So in this case, I have to switch in the left drop-down menu to product or company.

1. I don't understand why there isn't a classical "search all / the whole site" option, maybe even as standard option? This would save me a lot of time, because I have to change the standard setting almost every time, as as said, it doesn't find my product / company! Costs too much time!

2. Why does it cost too much time? Because the AJAX system seems to delete the search term every time. Why isn't it possible to keep the search time while switching to another option (topic/company/products/whole site) as a standard behaviour? I think, if this is technically possible, the "keep search term" should be a standard setting, which should be only changeable via your account settings.

3. I'm wondering, why I can only search through companies & products on the home page, but not through topics?? And how get to the search field (for topics) from there? Usability!!!
(E.g. maybe I want to to search about if BBCode is possible at GetSatisfaction...)
You have to think about, in this case YOUR company / product is in a special position, of course you're not "better" than the others, but on getsatisfaction.com, GetSatisfaction is also a little bit more important and that's fine. :)

4. Can one use BBCode here? (for "bold"/"italic"/"underline" etc. formatting) Or maybe XHTML? If it works please add a note here under the "1) This is a...." part.

1. I don't know why the title is UNDER the topic creation form, I haven't seen this ever before, I intuitively want to write my title question at first! Am I alone?
2. Why is the standard answer form at a question/idea/problem/discussion one that answers the last comment instead of the main question? That's stupid! I always might answer the question itself.
If I'd want to answer the persons comment, I can do it via the link.
3. I'd like to get much faster access to "my" products added, as the reason I added them is, I can immediatly get on their site(s), when I start getsatisfaction.com! I don't want to have to bookmark my sub-URL!
4. Companies/products should be find "Dash Command"-like, e.g. I searched your company "Get Satisfaction" with "getsatisfaction" and there was no search result!!
5. Why can't I delete a product/service, when I'm not the administrator of the group? I can't even possibly delete the products/services created by myself in such a group! This is not collaborative!
6. An product-URL I reposted got posted as "http://getsatisfaction.com/company name/...". So the "shortening" thing isn't that good. Although I don't know a solution for it.

So far for now what got my attention in around 10 minutes of using Get Satisfaction. ;)

Thanks anyway, great idea and relatively ;) usable! :)

(cross-posting my idea from: http://getsatisfaction.com/satisfacti... as per Amy's suggestion)

"Here's the thing: if you want to make a usable meta-data system you need clearly defined terms and in order to get clearly defined terms you need (in this case) company representatives that are well versed in their product to populate the system. This is a mantra Librarians and Information Professionals have been enveloped in for ages.

The current the tagging system is actually LESS transparent because it doesn't distinguish between user generated and company representative tags. So why not add an option to search [or browse] between the two?

This seems like a solution that would address all of the issues discussed in this thread and the added flexibility would yield better results overall."

In addition, I think I'd be really cool if wiki-style disambiguation could be added within the search function, but that would require some heavy indexing by key individuals within each company and product to be truly effective.

I've been checking out the service today and I think you've done an amazing job with Get Satisfaction. The interface is fantastic, there was just one little area that threw me for a loop as a new user: product/service selection for a new topic.

When I saw the big icon for the default product my first thought was that I was supposed to click on it to select it, but this in fact removes the product. What's worse, I couldn't find any way to get it back other than to remember the name and type it into the "Find products" field.

Now, I have absolutely no design skills but I did have a couple thoughts on how this might have made more sense to me on the first go:

- Differentiate the remove mouseover with a red X or something else that clearly separates remove from add. I think part of the reason I was confused was that the blue arrow implied some kind of positive action, like it was going to put the clicked on product name into the text box since the arrow points to the text box when there is only one product available.

- Display all products as equal-sized icons that the user can multiply select. If a "does not apply to any product" option makes sense, have this clearly called out. This has the added benefit of showing the product name under each icon so the user doesn't have to mouse over an unfamiliar icon in the "suggested products" list. In addition this would allow removing the empty boxes in the UI, which seem like the user or company is supposed to do something to fill them in.

- If a "does not apply to any product" option doesn't make sense and a company has only one product, don't even present a product selection interface.

- The text "suggested products" seems to indicate something context-sensitive to the user's question/idea/problem, but really this is just a list of all available products. Perhaps consider changing this to "other products" or "available products" or something similar.

If none of that makes any sense, then when the default product is removed it might be a good idea to at least have it appear in the "suggested products" list, showing the list if necessary. This way users can easily undo the remove action.

This would allow the Company to choose from the helpful users to make a list of the ones that help out the most and put it under "All Employees" or "Official Reps".

What do you think of this idea?

I think it would be wonderful to have a better, more multimedia-oriented introduction to using Get Satisfaction for people who aren't necessarily tech savvy. I'd like my organization (ONE/Northwest, http://www.onenw.org/) to transition to GS so that our community can answer each other's questions, instead of having every single one run though a support ticket, but they generally aren't Millenials. If, when logging in for the first time, a 2 minute video on how to use GS showed up, I think that would be a good way to make sure it's visible and usable.

The intro video for Skitch (http://skitch.com/) is a good example for this.

This is more of an idea than a problem. Well, more like a pixel-anal problem than an idea. Anyway, you allow the uploading of square images for company and product logos. It'd be awesome if everybody had a logo with a white background but alas. Anyway, as a designer, it bothers me that the logos that do take up the whole box (i.e., http://getsatisfaction.com/brightkite) aren't centered correctly. Specifically having 3 sides of equal spacing and then the bottom being at least half that.

It'd be awesome if this could be addressed. It would make this and a lot of other pixel-anal designers really happy. :)

HP = Hewlett Packard
GAP = Gap Brands, Gap Incorporated
Dunkin Brands = Dunkin Donuts
YUM! Brands = Taco Bell

Subsidiaries are hard to keep up with and naming systems are no breeze either.

There's gotta be a better way to access the company I know by the name that I'm familiar with.

Thanks, I'll take my comments off the air.

When I am looking at a company's 'get satisfaction' page, it would be nice if there was a direct external link to the company's website somewhere near the top, near the company logo.

So I've been browsing the list of companies on Get Satisfaction and I've spotted a few instances where products were listed as companies.

I don't think it's big deal but it is kind a bit of a PITA to have to go through the motions of becoming an admin. for every product that's mislabeled .

A much easier solution (from the user perspective), would be to simply have the ability to rename companies as products. Maybe implement an open editing policy for products and companies that are unclaimed...

Anyway, just an idea. Thoughts?

I've noticed that a number of our customers seem to be adding replies to an existing topic when the things the want to say really should be new topics. Example: Someone just posted a "I'm getting an invalid Zip Code error when trying to check out" reply to a "Where are you hiding your phone number?" topic. (we're working on getting the phone number some better site placement, fyi... ;-) ) I'd really love to be able to take postings like that and promote them to their own topic. Is that some thing we could get in a future release?