Demand Satisfaction!

Walk into a room with eight people having a conversation, and you’re bound to notice a number of extra details — the mood of the room, for example. We’re trying to capture these kinds of details and display them on Get Satisfaction so everyone can see what’s happening around the discussion. This week, we made new strides on this front by releasing a new version of the topic page.

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.

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.