Tony McCrae
Experience from squadlist.co.uk — an online tool for organising rowing outings. Set up during a Guardian employee’s spare time for his own rowing club, but suddenly getting over 1000 users. He needed to support the users of the site without spending time on them.
- sort out forgotten logins
- though have to be careful about security
- generate nice passwords using pwgen
- facebook isn’t permitted in some firms (so no facebook connect)
- prompt end users to talk to someone else other than you!
- can your users be divided into groups?
- form a relationship with one member in each group
- demo as documentation — install a full demo system with sample data and let them play
- reset its data regularly (but make sure you tell people!)
- Jira now has jQuery-based inline popup help
- invest in getting your domain unblocked
- put SPF in your DNS
- even if you send from
noreply@, check the volume going to it!- a spike may indicate something going wrong
- don’t tell everyone when changes happen
- just senior users
- introduce new features to a smaller test group
- enable beta group
- allow users to export their data automatically
- http://uservoice.com and http://getsatisfaction.com
- with a forum on-site, people keep on requesting the same new features, even if you provide a roadmap
- moving to these customer satisfaction sites means that existing feature requests no longer generate complaints!
- instead, people vote up the existing requests
- of course, if the requests never get monitored or picked up, you’ve still got disgruntled users
- really loud heavy users can be very powerful for good or bad
- hire them! or at least make them happy
- gmail labs has “canned responses”
- open source core product to ensure continuity
- provide “paid for” additional capabilities
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