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.

View full-size image

Below is a brief explanation of each part of the design.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Follow me on Twitter

We’ve added a simple (but very handy) new feature — shortened URLs.

Want to send a link to a Get Satisfaction topic to someone — but don’t want it to be massively long and wrap across multiple lines? Want to insert a shorter URL into a reply you’re composing? Can’t be bothered to copy it to your clipboard? Don’t sweat it. We’ve got you covered in all of these situations.

Just click on “Get a short URL” from the Share tab.

Paste.

Enjoy!

Computers are complicated. So is software. User interface glitches, buttons that don’t work, menus that are misleading — all of that is hard to explain with mere words when you are trying to get help from a company. Sometimes, it’s just easier to show them what you’re seeing on your screen. It’s easier for both customers and company employees. Win-win, as they say. So we’ve added image upload.

It’s pretty straightforward. When you’re posting a topic or reply, just click on “Add an image” and upload what you got to show. We’ll upload it and insert the image in-line in your topic or reply. You can also insert an image URL and point to an image that already exists somewhere online if that’s what you prefer. It’s a feature we’ve wanted to add for awhile, and we’re happy to say that it’s now ready to go.

If you’re a Mac user and want to improve the way you take screen shots — and annotate them — you have to try out Skitch. It’s pretty awesome. We’re all big fans of it in the Get Satisfaction office, and we use it every day to share thoughts, ideas, and detail what we’re seeing on our computers. Five minutes with this application, and you’ll quickly see how it can benefit you, even without digging into the advanced features.

Skitch or no Skitch, we hope that having the ability to show everyone else what you’re seeing will make using Get Satisfaction easier and more efficient.

The development rolls on at Get Satisfaction.

This time, we’ve updated the company home page. If you’ve got a problem with a company, that’s where you’ll likely end up: on that company’s Get Satisfaction home page. So what will you do when you get there?

Previously, the page was focused on exploration. We wanted you to get into the existing topics and look around. The new version is focused on getting answers. Our main goal with this redesign was to give this page a clear focus on starting a topic. We also wanted to give you the ability to easily scan existing topics.

Key to that quick search for answers is the big box right under the company’s name. Start typing, and we’ll look for topics that match. It’s a search box, but it’s also the start of your new topic — if you don’t end up finding a topic that satisfies you.

As always, it’s not just about questions. Problems, ideas, and discussions are still here, and they are more clearly called out as distinctively different. We feel that each topic type almost has its own personality, and we plan on calling that kind of distinctiveness out even more in the future. For now, the four topic types are available to choose from right away, and you can switch between them (and when you search, we search everything, not just “ideas”, for example).

We also added subsections as tabs: “People”, which displays the employees of the company, “Products & Services”, which displays all the products and services the company offers (plus related ones), and “Overheard”, which is, of course, that nifty way of seeing what people are saying about the company on Twitter.

Finally, the topics in the list below the big search box have clear chunks of information that make it easy to scan. And, we show more of them. Each one includes the avatar of the person who started the topic, as well as the name and avatar of the last person to reply to the topic.

Want to sort those topics? Go for it! We’ve added a way for you to pull out the most active, most popular, most recent, and unanswered topics. You can also filter by topic type. So, for example, you can quickly find the most popular ideas in a company’s space.

Those are the basics of the new page. We have a bunch of other details baked in there, but I won’t go on about them. Go give it a look-see — and, as always, let us know what you think.

We’re extremely proud and excited about these two new things we’ve created. Here’s the scoop:

Help Center

There’s a key detail about what we’re doing at Get Satisfaction that is sometimes hard to make shine through: We’re not trying to build a place where companies and customers are compelled to come to resolve their differences. That is, we’re not trying to capture people and keep them here. What we’re ultimately focused on is increasing the connections between companies and their customers. And that can happen anywhere. In fact, for best results, it should be happening in as many places as possible.

In that spirit, we’ve created the Get Satisfaction Help Center. It’s a PHP installation you can download and drop right onto your own Web site. It’s as easy as setting up a blog, and it allows you to push and pull all of the data from Get Satisfaction in a seamless way. Simply put: It’s our site on your site.

Here are a few examples already up and running: Joby, makers of the Gorillapod, Skitch, and a highly modified version for MyBlogLog. You can also see a default installation running for our own section of Get Satisfaction.

Since Help Center is based on PHP (surely the Web’s most popular programming language), it’s easy to install and customize. We offer some very pretty templates you can use, but we also encourage you to adapt it to your own site’s look and feel. After all, you’ve probably spent countless hours honing your company’s visual style. Go get it now and make it yours. Let us know if you have any questions right here in Get Satisfaction.

Also, a side note to developers. Help Center is actually an open source application hosted on Google Code under the MIT license, so if one of your modifications really rocks, you can share it back with everybody else!

Overheard

Ever wished you could respond to what people are saying about your company anywhere they’re saying it? Of course you do. I bet you wouldn’t mind chiming in about what people are saying about other companies, too, huh?

To help fulfill that need, we’ve added the Overheard feature. It’s a way for people to monitor and extend the conversations going on around companies and their products. Yep, we’ve got tons of that going on already on Get Satisfaction, but these conversations are from Twitter. That’s right: Twitter. You’ve probably noticed that Twitter is quickly becoming more than just a way to send shout-outs to your friends. It’s transforming into a primary attention stream.

Overheard tracks Twitter conversations — “tweets” — that mention a specific company or its products and displays them in a list. If you see a tweet that you think would needs an in-depth response or would make a great topic on Get Satisfaction, turn that tweet into a Get Satisfaction topic with a click. Anyone on Get Satisfaction can do this, and we ping the user on Twitter to let them know that we’ve started a new topic based on their tweet. It’s a great way to locate conversations going on out there in the wild and provide rich, archived (i.e. searchable) responses on the Get Satisfaction network. Combine this with Help Center, and companies are now able to bring distributed Web conversations into their everyday operations, improving their customer service and fostering retention.

If this idea of tracking mentions on Twitter isn’t something you’ve considered before, you might find that it’s a superb way to not only find out what people are saying about a company and its products, but also to connect with people you otherwise wouldn’t be able to reach. If you’re an admin for your company, you can even set additional keywords and tune this Twitter stream.

Go check it out for companies like Ebay, Comcast, Google, even the US Government. We think you’ll be surprised at just how neat it is.

A diaper bag. They asked Timbuk2 for it. Repeatedly.

The first diaper-bag query started eight months ago, and since then, there have been a lot of new conversations on Get Satisfaction imploring Timbuk2 to cater to the mommy (and daddy) crowd.

Should Timbuk2 branch away from the messenger bag market? Over the past few years, they appear to have made their brand even stronger by getting back to the basics. And that means messenger bags. This strategy has been very successful. Their customer community has grown to include tons of new customers. But some of those new customers apparently want a diaper bag.

Obviously, you don’t want to lose your legacy customers. Then again, some of Timbuk2’s legacy customers may fall into the used to be a bike messenger category. Surely some of them now identify solidly with the raising a little bike messenger demographic. They want diaper bags, too.

I’m not sure if Timbuk2 resisted the idea of making a diaper bag. But, they definitely did think about diaper bags in the last eight months. At one point, one of their employees even offered up her own Diaper Bag Hack Kit, a how-to for turning a regular Timbuk2 bag into a baby-accessory tote bag. Perfect gift for a baby shower.

The clamor from their customers apparently made a difference. Last week, Timbuk2 gave a sneak peek at their diaper-bag prototype. Yep, they’re building it.

But watch out, Timbuk2. As of yesterday, you’ve got a new request from your customers. A doggie bag.

Woof.

If you’ve spent any amount of time on social networking web sites, you’ve probably experienced a moment like this:

Hey, this site is pretty cool. Invite my friends? Okay. I know that my buddy Jimmy Pop will dig it, for sure. Let’s see, just enter your e-mail address. There’s the Submit button — Wait a second! Did I just spam everyone in my GMail???

Whether by accident or by design, many social networking sites have a confusing way of getting people to invite other people into the system. As we’ve been working on adding Contacts — other customers in the Get Satisfaction system who you may want to follow or refer to on a regular basis — we’ve made it our goal to avoid the pitfalls that many other sites have fallen into. We want to make sure you know what each “next step” in an invite process will be before you click that button.

So, give it a shot. Add some Contacts from your dashboard.

Tip: If you’re a Twitter or Flickr member, start by importing those. It’s lickety-split fast.

Feedback: We think we’ve gotten pretty close to what we envisioned when we started designing this new feature, but if you have any advice, kudos, or complaints, share them with us.

The topic page is where all the conversation happens, and this new one has a number of notable improvements:

Sharing: Know any helpful people? We’re betting you do, so we’ve made it easier to share topics, either by sending an e-mail to someone about the topic, or by sharing it through other social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Digg. This is a great way for both users of our site and employees to quickly share a topic with colleagues or friends — or anyone who might be able to contribute to the conversation.

Status: You can now see when a topic has been “answered” or “solved.” Both users and companies can indicate when they think this has happened, and the status sits at the top of the page. It’s a great way to get a feel for what’s already happened (and what to expect for the future of the conversation) when you land on a topic page.

Best answers: We’ve taken away the ability to mark a reply someone has made as “useful.” Instead, we’re letting people indicate which replies they think are the best, and those “best answers” get pushed to the top of the page. It’s a lightweight ranking system that also serves to put the most popular solution right under the problem being discussed. Not everyone will agree on the “best answer” to a particular question, but this is a great way to find the answer that seems to work for most people, while still allowing for disagreement on the finer details.

Mood: One of our favorite aspects of Get Satisfaction is emotion. We love emoting. Now, when you see a topic page, you’ll see the mood of the room displayed as a bar chart made up of the emoticon-like faces you’ve grown accustomed to. It’s a fun aspect of Get Satisfaction that we’ve extended to help gauge the mood of the room. We’re into fun.

Comments: In any group conversation, you hear a lot of one-liners, asides, and remarks about things other people say. These short snippets of conversation are generally aimed at one person, and they’re often not intended to be given the same weight as a formal reply. To capture that aspect of group conversation, we’ve added comments. These are short text responses you can use to indicate encouragement, praise, criticism — or plain old hooting and hollering. Again, this is a way to add emotion, but without using emoticons.

Beyond all of this, there are a number of smaller changes that you may or may not notice, depending on how much time you have already spent browsing Get Satisfaction. The layout is much clearer and easier to read based on a lot of design work from our crack team. We’ve added some new stats so you can see how many people are participating and what they think of the ideas being discussed. The list goes on, but you can see how it all works by visiting this conversation on Get Satisfaction.

While you’re there, tell us what you think.

Dopplr hired a new community design manager, Celia. I know because I read their blog, which is a marvel of beauty and simplicity. Okay, that’s saying a lot for a blog, but it really is nicely done.

As she puts it in her first blog post for the company, her job is to “talk to the people out there who are using Dopplr, find out what’s working and what’s not, and help the development team improve things accordingly.”

Hey, that sounds familiar. That’s kind of what I do, too. Welcome to the neighborhood, Celia.

To get that feedback, she’s trying something that others have had success with in the past: soliciting advice and comments from customers via Get Satisfaction. She’s asked for input about the redesign of the Dopplr Manage Connections page.

One of the most successful examples of a company soliciting that kind of product advice on our site has been Timbuk2. They used Get Satisfaction to ask their customers to help them design a new bag.

And, boy, did they respond. Ninety-three replies later, someone had this to say:

“I’m really bummed that I didn’t see this forum earlier. I travel a LOT (>150k miles/yr) and have a large collection of bags (bit of a bagophile). I have a large collection of Timbuk2 (a laptop briefcase, messenger bags in all sizes (some doubles), accessories, and I just got a Wool Commute bag that I haven’t used yet!). I also have a large collection of Tumi (20″, 22″, 22″ expandable, 24″, trifold suit bag, bifold suit bag, rolling large suit bag). I know the design phase is over, but I’d be thrilled to give my $0.02 worth on whatever design has been arrived at.”

That was the most recent person to add to this call for ideas — which began five months ago! Sounds like Timbuk2 has found at least one superfan who’s willing to give very valuable, very free advice. Well, almost free.

I bet there are a number of you out there who have very sincere, very valuable ideas about the way Dopplr presents itself to you. You can let them know what you think about it here.

[Dopplr and Timbuk2 are on Get Satisfaction.]

___

P.s. And, if you haven’t yet seen Mahalo Daily’s faux-infomercial about Dopplr, take two minutes out of your day to enjoy it:

P.p.s. [Mahalo is also on Get Satisfaction.]

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.