Acquiring feedback on web projects can be harder than you’d think, especially when you’re working on internal projects that don’t get discussed on outside your organization. By making feedback a fun, easy and rewarding thing to do more people might be encouraged to help us and put in the effort.
I’m sure some of you are in a similar situation: you launch a project and silence follows. Trivial problems might emerge but a there’s no general response to the long hours you put in. That makes it much harder to evaluate the project and set a schedule for future developments.
To help with this we’ve created a UserVoice page. Let’s describe it as a digg-like FAQ. People are encouraged to leave a message, can vote on feedback they find important, and always have the full picture of what the development is focused on. Developers act on the consensus and theoretically will work on solving the most urgent issues.
Of course this model will work best when both users and developers care enough to communicate. So Uservoice is engineered to make it trivial to leave a message. It can be easily integrated into an existing site. Some functionality requires a user account, which is a stumbling block. But you can leave feedback without it, which is a bonus. Oh and it doesn’t integrate with any bug trackers which is a shame.
Will it work and will there be enough participation? Ask me again in 6 months time. I’m not sure how to make it any easier though.
developing, feedback, uservoice
Brian Wood presents an excellent Dreamweaver tips video on Youtube. Many people just use DW as a text-editor but it’s capable of a lot more even in code view. The following video might open your eyes:
Very nice.
Mike Davies works as a web developer for Yahoo Europe and has some insightful comments on the Internet Explorer rendering switch (see source).
When a user upgrades from IE7 to IE8, they will be upgrading from IE7 to IE7. When a user upgrades from IE8 to IE9, they will be upgrading from IE7 to IE7. Notice the trend. [...]
Effectively, with this meta tag proposal, Microsoft have either absolutely guaranteed that they will remain the dominant browser on the web, or it has sown the seeds for its ultimate destruction. If it’s dominant IE7 will be the instrument to hold back all standards compliant progress, just like IE6 before it.
Source [isolani.co.uk]
I can only agree. It seems to me the switch will result in better fitting websites, but not by using more standards. But I noticed this at the whole Eolas patent debacle: the IE team doesn’t take enough responsibility regarding standards. Even though the code was fine they wanted developers to implement a javascript workaround for their own workaround solution in all their pages with embedded content. They didn’t want to (or couldn’t) pay Eolas so people now have to click to start embedded media. Even though it’s a browser issue.
And the same happens in this case: if the browser vendor took its responsibility and improved its implementation, the whole issue wouldn’t exist for webdevelopers’ if their sites written to standards (and valid) don’t display properly. So the whole “the users have to be protected from broken pages” card is a smoke screen in my opinion.
Just be frank then: corporate partners costcutting is more important to Microsoft than the freedom of the web.
