[mb-users] Digest of a personal thread that Fuchs started (Was: Uff ...)

[Simon Reinhardt]

Bogdan Butnaru wrote:
> We could use the "box on every page's corner" thing that we used to
> announce the server change. This I'm sure would give really great
> exposure to _specific_ issues, but we need to be _really_ careful not
> to overdo it. For example, we may say: "we just changed the way X is
> done, please tell us what you think", with links to the relevant
> page(s) and a tiny JS poll (great, sucks, don't really care), perhaps
> a link to the bug reporting page. But this is a very low bandwith
> channel, so it can only be used for easy-to-answer,
> personal-preference questions. It needs be used very carefully.

I must say I found this box very annoying and distracting. I would not like to ever see it again. :)

> We need to remember one thing: while we do have a lot of users, they
> mostly see MB as a "as-is" tool that just works. They use it
> occasionally. Most of those that care or need to know the details are
> those that read this mail, they're already involved.

I think there's a big bunch of members inbetween we should actually care about. Between the occasional I-tag-my-mp3s-user and the heavily involved community member there are a lot of people who do quite some editing and care about the data but don't have the time / can't be bothered to get get more involved. But they are the ones we should also (mainly?) reach.

> I just thought of something while composing the next phrase: did you
> notice how google and yahoo do their tests? After the internal testing
> phase, they make the new version available _on the real data_, to a
> select (but increasing) group of users. Sometimes google just picks
> users at random and gives them a different interface to see how they
> react. We could do similar (this works for interface issues, though):

Realising features to randomly activate features would be quite some work and overkill I think.

Simon (Shepard)