Several people, notably Grant, have made some good points about UserVoice lately and I'd like to fill in some background.
About five years ago a user named Mark was frustrated about the lack of communication between users and developers of MLO. He particularly thought we needed a way for users to let devs know what changes to MLO they really cared about.He wanted the devs to be able to tell which ideas mattered to lots of people versus which ideas mattered to a few people with loud voices. He got Andrey's promise of cooperation, then he reviewed lots of user voting systems that were available way back then, and picked UserVoice. The rules and the setup are Mark's and he served as moderator for about three years and then about two years ago he moved on. It's a tribute to Mark that this thing he set into motion is still running two year on autopilot. It has achieved its original objectives, and Andrey has kept up his side of the bargain, giving serious consideration to the big vote-getters and keeping it updated as to requests that have been implemented. That said, there are some problems that get worse as time goes by, and if we ever get to the point that the user community would like to make some big or small changes the first question will be, who's going to be the manager/moderator and does he or she seem likely to stick with it even when it gets frustrating? I would imagine that in the intervening years something better than UserVoice has showed up Here are the three main issues I'm aware of. 1. New ideas don't get a chance. When it was new every idea was on equal footing. But some ideas have been racking up votes for years now, and they are all on the front page. New ideas with a couple of votes are at the back. People with votes available usually spend them all before getting to the new stuff. 2. Big ideas for little products are lost. The best idea in the world for MLO/iPad is unlikely to make is on to the front page, it,s crowded out by even moderately popular ideas for MLO/Windows 3. people set up recommendations that duplicate existing recommendations, or they set up different but overlapping recommendations. This splits the vote and makes the idea look less popular than it is. There's no mechanism in UserVoice for merging two recommendations, and in the case of overlapping recommendations it's not clear that merging would be acceptable to all of the voters Is it time for a change? What would you differently? How? And most important, Who's gonna do it? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/ec142ae0-36ec-48af-97db-03a4a130ce91%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
