User:AdkinsWH/Sandbox FT Ward Class ideas

Ideas from Robert Kehrer's blog -- his response to a comment 1/8/2013 First, provide the details. Feedback should clearly and concisely outline the research workflow (step by step) that the user is intending to accomplish. It should include specifics that allow us to replicate the steps of the problem, or visualize the needed user feature. It should include enough explanation so that we can see why it is important and how life would be better with the change/enhancement. (Jade, Michael, you are both usually pretty good at this. Many are not)

Second, follow human relations 101 & leave out the emotion and angst. The “I hate your system”, “If it’s not broken, don’t…”, “you’re all idiots” type feedback is less useful. It was probably broken or we wouldn’t have changed it – $ are expended cautiously. We all have many constraints, requirements and priorities that limit how fast any feature can be delivered. We’re all passionate about genealogy & trying to do the best for the user as fast as possible. We live to make life easier for people to find ancestors and the system is being enhanced weekly. When we mess up, as happens sometimes when iterating on software, the guidance in the preceding paragraph will result in change faster than rudeness.

Third, Volume. As a product manager I always have hundreds of things I want to do in the product. Some are large major changes that take 6 months of engineering effort. Others are small couple day code & test efforts. All these need to be prioritized against each other. One of the many factors that figure into that prioritization is “How much joy can we provide to how many people?”. If you have real numbers or estimates of how many people a specific change will benefit these estimates are always appreciated and help us sort out a significant change from a single user request.

Lastly, Patience. We usually have already heard about significant requests or bugs. Sometimes they are being worked on or they may be part of a larger UI enhancement scheduled some months out. We also go through a several rounds of user testing and refinement on most features. It sometimes takes more time than users realize.