As an "Employee" for Mozilla for over a year (I'm not actually under their employ), this 37 signals thing makes several very valid points. For example, what if the Microsoft Xbox team did support under the Microsoft Xbox name, and someone complained that they didn't have a product for Microsoft Word and weren't answering their questions for Microsoft Word?
People (mainly this one guy who loves sunbird) keep complaining that Sunbird isn't listed as a product, and he honestly believes that since it's not listed as a product nobody's asking questions about it (believe me, we will get questions about a product regardless if there's a checkbox for it or not) that it's being 'dropped' in favor of development on lightning.
The problem is, Sunbird isn't a Mozilla Corporation product. It's not really a Mozilla Foundation product either. It's just a side effect of the Lightning project. There's no official support, because it's not official. However, there's no way to list some products, but make it when you click on them you're taken to the proper location for help. For example, there are some very helpful people on the Weave forums under Mozilla Labs, but people decide that they want to post Weave questions here instead. None of the Labs Loons (as I'll call them for now) want to leave their Lair (hey!) and help here too, because it's too much hassle. Likewise, 37 signals made a great point:
"At the very least they should allow companies with existing support infrastructure to claim their Get Satisfaction page and automatically and instantly redirect customers over to the official support site."
This is a great thing, and one of the first things that should be done when a new company is added. When I add a company (which is rare), I get the privilege of finding all the appropriate links, like the official page, contact page, FAQ page, and anything else relevant. I gladly do so! I know not all companies have the resources to help here as well, so I want people who find the page here to be able to get help REGARDLESS!
Here's an idea for Get Satisfaction: highlight those links on the bottom! Why are they on the bottom, where no one will find them? If a company hasn't claimed their page, the links to the FAQ and Contact page should be FRONT AND CENTER! This has an added bonus, you can instruct their customers on Get Satisfaction to ENCOURAGE the company to claim their page. Woo hoo!
Not to mention the large disconnect between the GSFN widget and the company page. If you don't regularly go to company sites looking for the Get Satisfaction widget, you may not have noticed that customers on those external pages can write PRIVATE support e-mails! That's right, Get Satisfaction isn't always 100% open. And what's wrong with that? There's a lot of discussion about "private get satisfaction", and I'd seen someone with a law firm mention the need as well to have secret posts. However, it's pretty odd that you can only access this from within the widget.
Also, duping threads shouldn't cost money.
April 01 @ 03:01 AM | 0 Comments | TrackbackGet Satisfaction is an awesome site. However, often I see people getting very confused about how the whole site works. Ape Shit's confusion is probably one of the best examples, and the most recent is over if posting to a thread will automatically e-mail you about new posts to the thread. @mlanger honestly believed that she was being e-mailed about a thread she had never participated in or chosen to follow, and asked to no longer be e-mailed about it, and in doing so, she opted in to being e-mailed about it. By saying "do not contact me", she said "contact me".
How did this happen? I already knew when I saw her post pop up in my inbox, I knew that she had seen this post in hers, and assumed she was already in the thread (while in fact, she was being linked to a different thread that contained the technical terminology that scared the pants off of her). This all comes down to, how stupid is the user? As we can see from Ape Shit (he's changed his name since, he's now Chimpanzee and screwing with microsoft, mozilla (twice), among others like photobucket and twitter. After being helped extensively (by me, and I received assistance throughout from others in irc.mozilla.org #sumo like lucy, djst, and zzxc, who verified I was providing correct assistance information which he refused to follow), he got helped by someone on justin.tv (and didn't disclose the assistance, possibly because he just didn't want to admit that assistance I gave was correct?).
Another situation: REAL! Dana didn't understand how to use reply (even though I went through their history and found out they did), so each 'response' was posted as a new thread instead. As well, instead of providing needed information (so she could be helped), she remained cryptic and decided to switch to Internet Explorer instead of have her problem solved. I would complain that perhaps replying is too hard, but I have no idea how that could be. One conclusion was she wasn't saving her login, and the "please login to post this reply" does not work with autofill, so after going to the regular login page, she posted her response in the huge 'new topic' box.
My goal in figuring out why users do stupid things is not to call them stupid (while that is fun), it is to figure out what is confusing them, and un-confuse it. Get Satisfaction's interface really is more conducive to new threads than it is to finding existing threads, especially with it's "limit 5 results" type here and we'll try to find already existing threads. There is supposedly a fix on the way (and has been for fucking months) that allows you to merge threads. I wonder if they'll let some superusers (curators) help out by nominating threads to be merged, especially for larger companies like twitter (mdy, I'm looking at you!)? Hope so!
August 21 @ 12:21 AM | 2 Comments | Tags: getsatisfaction | TrackbackI am excited, and I hope this turns out to be a good thing. One thing I'd love to do is have the iPhone in dock as basically a secondary iTunes display, and it goes dim when you don't touch but it stays lit (kinda like the mac screen), and when the song changes it gets brighter for like 5 seconds to announce it. You could then easily touch it to hit next song, previous song, pause, and most importantly, a stars slider. I don't rate enough music as it is, and using the itunes remote mainly as a way to remind me to rate a song (maybe an option to have it get brighter near the end and say "How was that?" and I can notice and rate) would be awesome.
July 06 @ 06:27 AM | 0 Comments | Tags: itunes, iphone, itunes remote | TrackbackOh boy!
Well, I have little familiarity with what makes Chyrp tick. For most web projects, guides for upgrading are useful. The Chyrp attitude is, run git on your server (I can't with dreamhost! It won't compile!), and use that to update. Well, I tried once before, and decided not to update. Today I tried again, with a better backup system (tarred it!) and went for it again. Used git here on my mac, made a tar.bz2, uploaded that, extracted, moved the proper files (.htaccess, /config/database.yaml.php, /config/config.yaml.php) over, and went from there. That worked, except for some issues with tags.
Good thing I made a new directory, too, because several things were relocated!
rename themes/default/{ => content}/sidebar.twig (100%)
create mode 100644 themes/default/feathers/audio.twig
rename themes/default/{content => }/feathers/chat.twig (58%)
create mode 100644 themes/default/feathers/link.twig
create mode 100644 themes/default/feathers/photo.twig
rename themes/default/{content => }/feathers/quote.twig (65%)
rename themes/default/{content => }/feathers/text.twig (56%)
create mode 100644 themes/default/feathers/video.twig
rename themes/default/{content => pages}/404.twig (100%)
rename themes/default/{content => pages}/archive.twig (94%)
rename themes/default/{content => pages}/drafts.twig (81%)
rename themes/default/{content => pages}/feather.twig (83%)
create mode 100644 themes/default/pages/index.twig
rename themes/default/{content => pages}/search.twig (84%)
rename themes/default/{content => pages}/tag.twig (85%)
rename themes/default/{content => pages}/tags.twig (100%)
rename themes/default/{content => pages}/view.twig (93%)
I have no idea exactly what all this means, but I can guess that some feathers were moved out of the content directory and up a directory, and that content was renamed to pages. If I had just done a raw upload of the git download (like I did once before) to the server with an sftp client (I use ForkLift), I'd have screwed things up again, as I'd have many duplicates. Now I've got a semi-clean upgrade. But now I've got a new issue that I hope isn't caused by my upgrade method. Earlier it was also having some issues with an 'index' with the same name as the tag, but since I'm not getting that now, I guess it's fine.
July 06 @ 05:58 AM | 0 Comments | Tags: chyrp | TrackbackSo, sometimes companies want to twitter. Currently, the only method is to share the name and password, and maybe sign your tweets like @bpp does. Kinda sucks, especially if your goal is to respond to a LOT of people.
Recently, I helped turn We All Hate Quickbooks into a disused support section. Better than nothing, I guess. The situation was, @kirasw and @tadmilbourn were replying to people complaining about quickbooks with links to the Twitter forum they set up. That worked, kinda, except people would have to make a new account. I'm pretty sure you can reply at getsatisfaction without making much of an account, and I think the site's a little friendlier, but that's my opinion.
Anyway.
The idea of turning unhappy users (venting) into happy ones works sometimes: people will retweet "hey, Mozilla saw my complaint and opened a support thread, awesome". However, a lot of the mentions of Firefox are the same recurring problem, which is why the (unofficial) helper, @firefox_answers, has a LOT of posts of the same canned response (which people notice). The other bad issue with the canned response is someone will actually see how he repeats "disable your addons" a lot and come to the conclusion that there is a deeper issue, when in fact it's usually just the bad Skype extension. My goal is to make this easier for users, a little more custom, and a lot more awesome.
I want to make a control panel that utilizes the Summize API, as well as possibly my own personal summize (ugh, I am not that good a programmer, so that might be quite difficult) for other services like Jaiku, Identi.ca, and Pownce. If one already exists, let me know. These will have canned responses, as well as canned urls (so that I can limit the box to 140 characters, minus the URL + space, and minus the username responding to plus two spaces for the @ and the space after the name, for personal responses). As well, it will filter by language, so that support can be in your language, and that you can help people near you. Of course, this will be usable for more than just Mozilla, so it is likely that after refinements my "Help the helpless" panel will become public. Open source? Maybe, but I'll definitely have some license where if you're making money because of my panel (and keeping people using your product and purchasing upgrades count), you need to give me some money, because hey, I need to eat.
Commence telling me which license I should open source it under, heh.
July 06 @ 05:48 AM | 1 Comment | Tags: twitter, overheard, support, mozilla | Trackback