One of the projects we’re working on is a new version of the community overview page for each organization, and today I’d like to invite you to take a look at a draft design and give us any feedback that you think would help us improve it. But first, let me fill you in on some background.
Most customer support communities on Get Satisfaction have some level of employee involvement (about three-quarters), but the rest are added and cultivated by customers. Some of these are very active, and others have little or no activity. Our recent redesign of the page wrapper and header was aimed primarily at helping organizations who want to use Get Satisfaction as an official or semi-official customer community. But it’s also very important to us to serve the customers of non-participating organizations in a way that honors those organizations and allows them to promote their preferred support channels. Above all, we want clarity about what Get Satisfaction is in relation to any organization in our system, whether they use us as a primary support system or have opted out of all involvement. In fact, the code name for this release is Clarity.
We’re viewing these support communities as “spaces’ that can be modified depending on the needs of the customer. In addition to these changes, we’re also planning more ways for organizations to personalize their space. This draft design focuses on the instance of the community overview page in which an organization is not participating (”unclaimed”). Our goals for this page are as follows:
- Communicate the purpose of the site to people unfamiliar with Get Satisfaction
- Display in the clearest of terms the organization’s level of participation
- Provide a transparent path for an organization to claim their space or opt-out
- Point users to the organization’s preferred support channel, and feature links to other places on and offline where they may communicate with the organization
- Expose the Get Satisfaction customer community (latent or realized) around this organization, and provide a simple way for a user to self-identify as a customer
- Provide ways for users to interact (e.g. discuss, rate) around the organization and its products/services, again in a way that honors it
The draft below is unfinished, and not a fully rendered visual design. So please keep that and our goals in mind as you review it.
The Unclaimed Community Overview Page
Below is a brief explanation of each part of the design.
1. Organization name and participation indicator
First off, you’ll notice that there is no logo here. For non-participating organizations we will no longer be displaying logos uploaded by users in the header. Instead we will display the organization name under the default descriptor “People-powered customer support for.” The phrase “People-powered” is intended to convey the distributed, crowd-sourced approach that we’re all about. (For participating companies we’ll still display the logo)
Below the organization name is the Participation Status, which says that this organization is Not yet Participating. By placing it in bold type treatment right under the logo we hope to be crystal clear about the role of the organization here. Other organizations may have a Participation Status like one of the following:
Cyberdyne Systems is Active in this Community
Cyberdyne Systems is Monitoring but not Active
Cyberdyne Systems has Opted Out of this Community
We’re still working on the language, but that’s the general idea. Organizations will be able to set the status to the one that makes the most sense, and change it at any time.
2. Get Satisfaction Explanation
To the right of the organization name we display boilerplate text explaining what Get Satisfaction is. We will also display a link to the user who added the organization to Get Satisfaction to display the customer-created origins of these unclaimed organizations.
Under the explanatory text is a link that invites employees of this organization to claim or set their status as explained above. This will open a new page with the options to proceed. It’s worth noting here that Get Satisfaction validates the employee relationship with every initial claim.
3. Support Links
We’ll be adding a link box that prominently features the official support channels for the organization, wherever they are. This might be a 1-800 phone number, an email address, one or more help pages, even a UserVoice feedback forum. Our goal is to direct people to the best place for getting results with that organization.
Part of this link box will provide social media links. We’d like to connect customers with the organization not just at its official support channels, but anywhere it is interacting online (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc). Anybody may submit links or contact info to fill this area out, and employees will be able to manage the link box.
4. Customers Spotlight
Here we’re showing some of the customers that have associated themselves with this organization on Get Satisfaction. Visitors may add themselves to this membership by clicking the I’m a Customer, Too! button. We’re also showing other organizations and products that these users are affiliated with.
5. Rate the Organization
We’ll continue to let users rate organizations and their products using the well established Net Promoter Score. This is the lightest weight satisfaction survey, used by many of the top brands in the world to understand how customers perceive them.
6. Post a topic to the community
The main difference here from the current site is the revised headline, “Ask a Question of Cyberdyne Customers.” Since no employees from the organization are here, we’re marking this as a place for conversations between customers.
So that’s the draft. We’re looking forward to any feedback you have. We’ll be making similar changes for the support overview page for participating organizations, as well as providing greater layout control of their space. This is but one piece of a larger redesign effort that we’re in the midst of, so please continue to make your general suggestions here: Get Satisfaction Ideas. We’ll be posting more sneak previews of upcoming features in coming days and weeks.
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I appreciate the new design features, but I still think “people-powered” isn’t as apparent as “unofficial” in bringing home the fact that it’s not an official channel. Maybe you can show “people-powered” once they’re opted in? I dunno.
Other than that, looking much better.
I’m not a native English speaker but the wording of “Ask a Question of Cyberdyne Customers” seems odd. Did you mean “to Cyberdyne Customers”?
Also, “People-Powered Customer Support” doesn’t convey what you think it conveys. All customer support is people-powered. What you mean is ‘Community-Powered Customer Support’ or ‘Customer-Powered Support’
And as others have suggested, remove the ‘yet’ in ‘Not yet Participating’ or better, clearly state that you have no affiliation with the company. “Get Satisfaction has no affiliation with X”.
Just my 2 bits
The only thing that jumps out at me is that, at a glance, the grey bar felt like disabled content. I think the reason is that it feels like the rating feature is lightboxed above the content. Since it’s centered and over a grey background with high contrast, it makes it feel like the content on the sides fades into the background until I rate it.
Of course, it’s entirely likely that I’m overthinking it because of my acute awareness of different interaction models and designs, but I think it’s worth addressing.
I might even say that when a company isn’t participating, the official support channels should be the most visible and emphasized content on the page, but I understand that might be taking it too far.
I think the copywriting changes are right on, but the grey bar area feels like it could stand a little evolution. Hope that helps.
A few thoughts, but I’ll spread them out over a few comments. Otherwise, I’m liable to write 2/3rds of a monolithic comment, and then never finish it.
First thought on the “organization name and participation indicator”: I’d hate for a user to see a red box (not yet participating) and thing that *they* had done something wrong. A strong red like that is usually reserved for either an error message on a form validation, or for a warning on a potentially destructive act (”This account will be permanently deleted. You sure you want to do that?). Either way, that red suggests some aspect of danger *within the relationship between the user and the application* … not between the application and a third party (the company / product on the page).
Others might disagree, but you might want to play with an alternate palette for those Participation Status indicators.
More comments as I have time. Thanks for opening this up.
This is going to sound childish, but when I first saw the “I’m a customer too!” button, I thought it said “I’m a customer tool”. In the interest of not accidentally pissing anyone off, you might want to change that a bit :)
Love it.
I’d echo Jeremy – the word “unofficial” is very common for efforts like this. EVERYTHING is people-powered. ;-)
The GS Explanation is good– though you can imagine that a user MIGHT get the wrong idea if that’s where they started. “Oh, I can connect with other customers AND EMPLOYEES! Awesome!”. Maybe you can have that read differently for opted-out or non-participating companies. Edge-casey, but confusion will happen.
Also, I’m eager to hear about the FIRST page that most people interact with GetSatisfaction: Google Search result pages. Are the title/meta-description of the pages going to be different depending on whether the company is participating?
As always, love what you guys are putting together. Congrats!
Way to take a scathing criticism of your company and turn it into something positive.
The new design looks like it addresses the problem head-on.
I’m not totally sure what the point (for me, as a user) of the Customers Spotlight is.
Perhaps I’m jaded from bad experiences online, but I see the “I’m a customer too!” button, and I think “So … is that opening me up to getting spam from Company X?” I know that isn’t your goal, and I know you wouldn’t disrespect GS users like that. But, because I don’t see how “signing up” as a “customer” benefits me / helps me do what I’m trying to do / etc., I’m hesitant to click on it. Wesabe has good language around this, where they let you indicate that you’re a “fan”, a “user” (or is it “customer”?), or a “captive” of that particular company. I’d be far more inclined to select a radio box with one of those three options, as it conveys to me that I’m giving some level of feedback to the community / company, even if I don’t write up a full-on post / complaint / comment / idea. I know this is the same general idea as the Rate the Organization box, but I’m more likely to pick from a clearly-delineated set of three (fan / customer / captive) than to select from a fuzzy 11-point scale. Plus, it violates Krug’s First Law, and makes me think: “Is my rating of this company in line with other peoples’? What if I’m being overly harsh / generous? What constitutes a ‘recommendation’? …”
I think the language for a company’s status in the community could be more clear.
First of all I think it should be reduced to 3 types. “Active”, “Not Active” and “I’ve already got one” . I’ve removed “Monitoring but not active” because it sounds creepy and doesn’t give much value to customers.
I’ll give it a go.
Cyberdyne Systems is actively supporting it’s customers in this community.
Cyberdyne Systems is not participating in this community.
Cyberdyne Systems does not use Get Satisfaction for official support.
Thoughts?
After reading the Net Promoter Score bit, I can better understand what you’re going for with that. So maybe this is more a beef with the NPS system than your implementation of it. But I still read “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” as overly ambiguous: I might be *likely* to recommend a company, but it might be a *weak* recommendation. That is, they might be very top-of-mind, but I’m not necessarily going to endorse them strongly. On the other hand, I might be a HUGE fan of some company, but I don’t think of them that often. So in that case, I’m not very “likely” to recommend them to a friend or colleague. Or maybe I’m a huge fan of a company, and I’m likely to recommend them, but they’re really specialized, and none of my friends or colleagues would care. In that case, again, not very “likely” at all.
I’m totally picking nits here, and I know you’re trying to work with a “standard” question. But I still think a three-option gradation, using language like Wesabe’s, gives a clearer understanding of the customer’s relationship with the company.
Ted, I like those tweaks. Personally, I’d change “… is actively supporting it’s customers …” to “… actively supports its customers …”, as I think it’s stronger, but that’s not a big deal.
Also, I don’t know that removing “yet” is necessary on the second one. Keeping “yet” leaves open the (very real) possibility that the company doesn’t know about the community yet. When you remove the “yet,” it suggests that the company has decided not to use the community for support, which is the entire point of the third option. So, yeah: I’d keep #2 as “Cyberdyne Systems is not yet participating in this community.”
One more comment, and then I’ll stop clogging up the tubes.
I think what I’m about to say is actually more important than any of the other bits I’ve talked about. The gray bar? The whole thing? I think everything in it would be best served as sidebar content. I know that’s where you have the NPS rating now, but I don’t think I’m just being stuck in the past.
Here’s the crux of it: I see GS’s main promise of value being that it allows for questions / conversations from customers (and from employees). When you have that giant gray bar there, it pushes the conversations WAY down on the page. I know the “fold” is a debated concept, but in terms of layout hierarchy, stuff at the top (especially big, colorful stuff, like an 11-point grading scale) is going to take precedence, and is going to condition the user’s response. If I were visiting Get Satisfaction for the first time, I would think “What do I do here? I grade a company? I see other people who use this company? How does that help me solve my problem?”
I do think the right-most element of the gray bar is the most significant of the three, and I do think it would be best at the top of the sidebar (essentially, where it currently sits on the page). But the other two would be best below it, followed by whatever tertiary content makes sense in the sidebar. As a bonus, that would give you an “official support module” that you could just remove from the companies that have elected to use GS as an official support channel. Easy to clean up the view.
In the current company view, the “add to the conversation” cues are pretty up-front. I’d hate to see their prominence diminished by elements of the page that aren’t core to helping customers get satisfaction.
As someone who was strongly on 37Signal’s side in the kerfluffle, I have to say that this IS a real improvement. I particularly like the inclusion of the support links.
I think “Customer-Powered Support for” would be a a clearer, but still short and inviting header above the company name for reasons others have explained.
One thing I didn’t see mentioned is that this design appears to still use product shots or logos under the “Cyberdyne Systems makes” heading. That’s something that really struck me the wrong way under the old design, since it added to the air of “official-ness”. In keeping with ditching the main company logo, you should perhaps drop those in favor of plain text as well.
The “X has Opted Out of this Community” copy seems like a poor choice, it makes it sound as if the company has given a big f*** you to the people using the forum.
Richard -
I think that’s why they’re considering “Company X does not use Get Satisfaction for official support.”
Really great feedback, all! It’s interesting to see where the feedback is consistent with our own concerns, and where it diverges even between commenters.
A few things are clear–the language is incredibly important to get right, and that’s not an easy task. People read very different things into the same words. And “focus grouping” alone won’t necessarily lead to the right answer. We’ll have to go with phrasings that reflect our voice, taking all this excellent input into account.
Have no fear, the visual treatment of the profile bar here is really just a scratch pad look. We’ve got some much prettier comps going on here at the Satisfactory.
@Charlie, in particular, your feedback has led to some really interesting conversations internally. We’re looking at different ways of conceiving of the interactive/participatory components in the top of the page to make better use of the space and embody the benefits of our system more effectively. We also checked out your work–you’re quite a good designer!
@Tony: We actually changed the titles of our community overview pages to specify when a company is not involved by calling it out as “Unofficial.” Topic-level pages (where most of our SEO traffic comes from) don’t mention company name at all–they just state the title of the topic. See this image for an example: http://skitch.com/thor/bmg37/how-can-you-use-bullet-list-items-in-the-mac-mail-client-google-search
Thanks all for your great feedback. Keep it coming.
I think these are far more effective changes than what currently exists on most company pages where the company is not participating.. however, there are some things that could be improved. Here are my thoughts, a few of them are echoing what others have said, some are different perspectives, and one is flat out critical to being straight forward with the user.
Like Garrett Dimon points out, I too feel that the gray box looks like disabled content. I like how some customer pages on the existing site are presented with the yellow bar (”Important message from [company name]“) and a message with a link “To get the fastest service from our support team, go here:” That works pretty well… more so then this gray bar design.
This gray bar also seems like it could use more thought. For example, the important things on this page are the “get official support” and “ask a question of [company's name] customers.” Therefor I think they should be at the top of the page. The “i am a customer too” area and the “what do you think?” areas are very much tertiary information and can be way further down the page.
Oh and I agree with Tim Dorr’s point on “I’m a customer tool†..the exclamation mark, at first glance looks like a L.
So, lastly, the most critical feedback I have to offer. This may be a change in how GS thinks about it’s system but I find “share ideas” and “report a problem” very misleading especially in the case where the company has not participated. These are essentially, “suggest an improvement” and “report a bug” It tells the user that if they post their problem here, someone will be responding to them.. perhaps someone from a company.
Truth be told, if the company is not signed up on GS then those suggestions and bugs will never be addressed. I think if the company is choosing to use their own in-house tools for customers to report bugs or suggest features that these to buttons on the post form should be removed entirely. It’s just simply too misleading to the user.
@Nick: Great points, and we’re already incorporating most if not all of them into our work.
The one I take some exception to is the final one. We absolutely do not want to mislead or confuse anyone, so your point is well taken that we can do more to clarify that we aren’t guaranteeing that the right people in organization will see it. Perhaps the best place to do that is when they’re posting a topic. But there are two reasons I don’t think that the answer is removing those topic types.
First, reporting problems and sharing ideas can be incredibly valuable to the customer community alone. There may be other users who have solutions or hacks to offer, or developers who are working on third-party add-ons that enable the desired features.
Secondly, it’s very important to us that people have an outlet to report a problem or suggest a feature when they don’t feel they are being heard through a formal channel, or when a channel doesn’t exist for doing so. We have seen over and over that Get Satisfaction can be effective at giving people a voice when they had none before in these circumstances. Furthermore, they are indeed often addressed by employees who claim their organizations on Get Satisfaction in order to respond. This is especially true of big brands where this scenario is most applicable (most small companies add themselves and have employees participating).
As a final note, we don’t want to force organizations to add additional support/feedback channels into their workflow. One of our goals is to make it easy for them to sync activity on Get Satisfaction with whatever internal systems they have.
Thanks again for the detailed input.
I too was firmly on the 37 Signals side of the inital argument. I still am, to a lesser extent. Here is why.
I think your overall response to this has been a positive one. I do, however, feel you are still trying to find a nanguage compromise that is not comfortable for me. The language still feels too strong. It still feels like coercion moreso than presenting your opportunity on its own merits. It also comes across as arrogant. That works for rockstars but it doesn’t work for strangers who want my business in a market with infinite and easy choices.
“Cyberdine Systems is not yet participating” sounds like an absolute decree. Yes, they probably are participating, just not here and why should they if they don’t want to. You imply they have chosen poorly. Who are you to jusge that? “Cyberdine Systems is not yet participating in this forum – you may find their official support at Cyberdine Support (link). We would appreciate a mention to them that they have customers here at Get Satisfaction with questions” is a far-more accurate, equitable and community-spirited presentation of what is going on, if a little clumsily worded. It is the difference between demanding and asking. Demanding is not humble – it is confronting. This is the headline – it sets the tone for my whole experience of your service. First impressions .. you know the drill. The rest of it looks pretty-much fine to me – what a shame you fell at the first hurdle.
To me the coercive undertone betrays a lack of confidence in your service. Usually bullies are bullies because they are useless assholes. Nothing personal but that’s my generalised cognitive thought-association train (insert psychobabble here). If you presented it in a more neutral, equitable tone then my initial, almost-subconscius reaction may be more positive. My first impression from the coercive tone is that of bullying. That’s not a good first impression for a community exercise.
I like your service but I don’t like feeling bullied. Unlike real-life bullies, you are easy to walk away from with no fear of reprisals. One click, you’re gone. You lose.
There will be no Microsoft / Google / whatever in SAAS. SAAS is a big arena and being the biggest or the first doesn’t guarantee a win like it did in the old days. Cloud computing now means that even a boofhead like me can scale an application infinitely with nothing more than a good idea and a positive attitude. It is the idea and the ethos that will win.
@Ewen, First off, we posted this very rough draft because we realize that we are in something of a bubble within our team and want to be sure we don’t accidentally come off as arrogant, bullying or coercive with our language or design choice. So we’re listening carefully. However, I think you misunderstand our intent here.
The “Cyberdyne Systems is not participating yet” is not intended for an organization that has opted out. This is the state before they have made a choice one way or another. People have expressed opinions both ways on this word choice (see above comments), and we haven’t made a final decision on what works best. We want to be clear, non-judgemental, and supportive of an organization. Language can be very subject, so this is no easy task.
It sounds like your main suggestion is for the instance when an organization has explicitly opted out. If I understand correctly, the main thing you’d like is a link to their preferred channel right there at the top. That’s a fair request. In fact, we already support that with our Company Message feature–it’s just not showing in this draft. You can see an example of this here: http://getsatisfaction.com/panic. The fact that we left this off the mockup may be us falling into the “curse of knowledge”, as we know this feature exists but you, the casual observer, do not. So we’ll try harder to be explicit.
Thanks.
Thor:
“…we don’t want to force organizations to add additional support/feedback channels into their workflow. One of our goals is to make it easy for them to sync activity on Get Satisfaction with whatever internal systems they have.”
That is very good to hear and perhaps the core issue I had with the 2 topic areas/tabs within the post form. I commend you on these efforts.
Best,
- Nick
First impressions from a straight design aspect is that the page is too busy. One of the problems I have had with GS is that it is not clear what function the page(s) are trying to achieve and this has not been solved in the draft.
Some IMO examples. The ‘nav’ is below the top elements of the page. This seems the wrong way round and I don’t consider anything in the grey box to be that important. The important stuff is the topics and products so get them up the page.
I’m not keen on another ’social’ site bunch of photos and members profiles. If I’m looking for support, officially or unofficially, I don’t want to form a ‘friendship’ with other customers or even employees. This may be dependant on the type of company being represented but for mine I just want a professional support area.
I really have an issue with how non-participating companies are conveyed. It has to be made absolutely clear that a company may have decided not to use GS and the reason why. This could be simply that they don’t know it exists, so it needs something more appropriate than “… is not yet participating…”, or that they have their own support channels and GS is an unofficial support community. GS really has to move away from making out that they are in any way an official platform for a company unless the company has clearly decided on using them.
The community message in the top right needs to be more prominent as most people will not read that part of the page.
Although my comments may be seen as largely negative I do support the initiative of seeking feedback for this important part of the site.
Thor
I was referring to “Cyberdyne Systems is not participating yet†in its guise as the status of a company that is yet to opt out. It still sounds a little strong & absolute to me.
Thor: “The “Cyberdyne Systems is not participating yet†is not intended for an organization that has opted out. This is the state before they have made a choice one way or another.”
Ewen: I believe they have made a choice, just not in your arena. I feel the wording needs to be specific to your arena rather than inferring they have not made a choice, internet-wide.
That’s all. I know it’s a fiddly semantic difference and I seem to be out on a limb on this one. Granted, my critique of your wording used wording that was probably far too strong for the point I was trying to make. That in itself illustrates my point. I actually do like your service and do think you’re intentions are good. It didn’t really come out in the wording did it?
nice.i’m love it.
I’ll keep it short: I love the new header, think it’s totally the right direction.
However, I think it takes up too much vertical space…this is good info, but it pushes the call-to-action wayyyy down the page, which could be just as confusing for a new GSFN visitor.
Keep up the great work!
One thing confuses me here: if I create a resource on the web (a web site) and offer it to people so that they could use it to make their own forums/chat rooms/discussion threads etc. with the intention to help each other, then why is the onus on me to seek out and offer any ‘official’ resources that may pertain to that conversation?
Let’s say someone comes to my site and starts a new forum, thread, topic, or whachamacallit. Let’s say they strike a conversation on how to most optimally install/configure/use some software product made by some software tool vendor. According to the discussion that I’m reading here, I, as the owner of that site, am now saddled with the extremely tedious and unpleasant duty to detect that conversation in almost real time and to quickly scour the web in order to supply all the ‘official’ channels where these issues could also be brought up.
My question is: why? Why is the onus on me? Am I not free to offer to others a platform where they could meet, greet, bring up their problems/issues/concerns, and in the process make some much needed headway? So what if it has to do with some registered business out there? Why is it all of a sudden a big legal offense to discuss issues pertaining to a certain product without not mentioning all the ‘official’ channels of support?
I must say you guys lost me here. What’s your problem? Let people start a conversation on any business they’d like, and let them be proactive about it. Let the vendors shit bricks and sweat bullets trying to figure out how not to lose customers. The onus is on them, it’s not on you.
Since when is it Get Satisfaction’s responsibility to make sure that people out there know about the existence of the ‘official’ channels of support for potentially millions of businesses in the world?
Thor et al., you guys should not cave in under the pressure of this balloney protectionism bullying. Just tell them to take a hike. You were doing fine until 37signals started bullying you. Why are you acting so afraid of them? They’re just a bunch of manipulators. Stay your course, insist on offering the service the way you’ve originally envisioned, and chill out and don’t fret about scouting the web and ‘covering your asses’ by digging up all these moronic ‘official’ channels of support. That’s just going to unnecessarily slow you down.
You can afford to ignore those bullies. They are just running around being scared of the web, and being afraid of the freedom that web brings.
Cheers!
I find the usability of this process very overwhelming. I would want to look at side-by-side comparisons. Often redesigns make things worse. The biggest issue for me is that people have to sign up to post. My customers all hate it and ALL refused to do it. We’re all sick of signing up! My daughter sent us photos of our grandson on Kodak’s site and I wouldn’t sign up to see them and neither would my wife. How can I get customers to do that so I can interact with them? I’d like to describe what the page is about myself. I want a place to get feedback and testimonials and it all is to complicated for me. Maybe simplicity is better than clarity.
All unofficial sites should have NOINDEX meta tags to avoid confusion with the genuine article and eliminate SEO spamming.
Outstanding layout improvements. All the right stuff in all the right visual and functional hierarchy. Anything can be tweaked and improved, but this an excellent step in the right direction. Smart and fair business decision to withhold branded sites (company logo) for non-GS customers. I think the current OpenID sign-in addresses the valid aversion to signing up for yet another account, mentioned by Kit. Looking forward to more GS^2 (Get Satisfaction Good Stuff).
I would agree with some of the other comments about the challenge getting customers to sign up for another service to ask a question. If an approach similar to this comment form could be used, it would be more heavily used.
Also, being new to gs, I found the biggest challenge was how underemphasized the search was. The focus is so heavily on asking new questions when there may very well be answers already to what I am about to ask. When you are asking a question or reporting a problem, it should almost force you through the search and suggest possible matches before allowing the creation of a repetitive question. Ideas and praise are less likely to be repeats or matter that they are. As a customer looking for answers, I’d really like to get them as fast as possible.
Also feel like I’d be more inclined to see product areas above other customers. Seeing a bunch of avatars for people I don’t likley know doesn’t seem as valuable as identifying with a product I am using and getting to answers faster.