The interface you see on Get Satisfaction has undergone a bevy of changes since we started writing the first lines of code. You may not have noticed some of them (that’s good!), but we’ve now entered an especially fruitful time for interface changes. The most recent change just went live, and it’s perhaps our largest improvement yet. We’ve redesigned how you post a topic.
The challenge we were faced with: We need to let our users do nearly anything they want when they start a new conversation. The less rules the better. We love, love, love personal expression, and we hate, hate, hate rules that constrict people. We want to make it as easy as possible for people to interact.
But, just as with any place where people converse, any community, the way people converse matters. When people ask questions that are more-or-less grammatically correct, that contain sincere emotions, that are aimed at finding solutions rather than simply ranting, — that are thoughtful — well, then other people might actually answer these questions.
Or, to put it another way, people with style and good manners get more attention when they’re seeking to get attention.
Since everyone posting to Get Satisfaction is seeking some kind of attention, we’ve tried to make that question-asking process (although it’s not just about questions) as easy as possible, while at the same time helping people make their point stylishly. We’re doing that by setting up a framing system that encourages people to ask great questions.
Now, when you start a topic, you have a clean, ordered, numbered list of actions to take. Ask your question, give it a great title, and let us know what product or service it’s about. You can also optionally add tags to topics and add emotion to make your topic even better. And that is the part we’re especially excited about: quietly encouraging everyone’s topics to be the best they can be so more people will participate and answer. To help out on that front, we’ve created a neat-o meter that lets you know what you can do to boost the chance that others will respond to your topic. Want your question about the iPhone to be more visible and enhance its chance of getting answered? We give you tips on how to accomplish that by tweaking your question.
The intended side effect of this new system: We’ll all get more readable, more findable, and better results in Get Satisfaction. Providing successful, unobtrusive support like this is the Holy Grail of user interface design, and we’re incredibly excited to roll this out.
In addition, we’re on our way to better search functionality. You can now search within any company and get all the results on a page. And, if you don’t find what you need, it’s easy to start a new topic.
We’d love to hear what you think about this new design. Love, hate, or somewhere in between? Tell us all about it in this conversation we’re having about it.
Or… Start a new topic yourself right here — and tell us what you think about our new approach.
