Feedback moves pretty quick in the iPhone apps marketplace. It can take just one small bug in a newly released or updated app to see your iTunes store reviews plummet. What’s worse, waiting for the app store to approve a fix for the problem can be an excruciating wait.
Zsombor Szabó, creator of OpenMaps, wanted to avoid just that problem with his future releases. To solve the problem, he implemented our IdeaScale iPhone feedback widget within OpenMaps. In just under a day, he was up and running with a new version of OpenMaps, collecting ideas and feedback right within the app – no need to leave the application to send an email or fill out a web form.
“We collected feedback via email, Twitter and GetSatisfaction too, and still do. The IdeaScale iPhone widget was supposed to be an experiment. It turned out to be a hit as we received much more user feedback than before. It seems people really like giving feedback right from within the application.”
Interested in collecting feedback within your iPhone apps? Learn more about the IdeaScale iPhone feedback widget and OpenMaps from the links below.
More Info:
Categories: Best Practice · Feature Enhancements
Lots of new IdeaScale features on the horizon. Stay tuned here as we release them…
Since day-one when we launched IdeaScale, “custom fields on users” have been a consistent request. We have finally got all our ducks in a row to launch this feature. Collecting basic information about your IdeaScale user community is probably one of the most important things you can do. Where are people coming from? How did they hear about your community?
We’ve now made it much easier to gain deeper insight into IdeaScale users by giving you the ability to add questions (or custom fields) to a profile. Now you can add basic questions to the new user registration form. For example, you can ask your users such questions as ”What is your zip code?” or “What is your age?”.
To add/delete/update custom fields to your users profile: Login->Choose Community->Custom Fields
After adding custom fields, when users signup, they will be asked to fill out the profile. Once you start capturing this data, there are a few neat tools available at your disposal. For example, automated reports for each of the fields are produced. If one of your questions in your custom profile is a “Gender” question, you can get a high level overview of the gender distribution of your community.
Login -> Choose Community -> Reports -> User Report
Searching: If you are looking for users that match a particular profile (Males between 21-25) and would like to search for users within your community that match that profile, you can do that easily.
Login -> Choose Community -> Users -> Search
Exporting Data: Of course the User Export functionality also has been enhanced to include custom fields on the Excel Report.
Login -> Choose Community -> Reports -> Export Data
Categories: Feature Enhancements
One of the biggest struggles that iPhone app developers encounter is the difficulty with collecting feedback without interrupting the user experience. As more and more applications flood the iPhone app store, this crowded marketplace gets more and more competitive each and every day. Unfortunately, the feedback model as provided by the iTunes app store generally sways towards negative feedback that is slow to finally reach the developers (ex. rating an application upon un-install).
To solve this problem, we partnered with cavoort.com, an iPhone consultancy, to develop a feedback widget powered by IdeaScale. When added to any iPhone application with just one line of code, feedback can now be collected in real time. Learn about nasty bugs as your users encounter them and fresh ideas as your users dream them up — all directly inside your iPhone application.
Are you an iPhone developer that needs to collect feedback? Try out the IdeaScale cocoa widget for iPhone in your application today.
If you have an iPhone, you can try out this widget now by installing “MeasureMe” in the iTunes application store. Note that version 1.2 or higher of MeasureMe includes the plugin (as of this writing, it is still awaiting approval in the iTunes App Store).
More Info:
Categories: Feature Enhancements
Collecting basic information about your IdeaScale user community is probably one of the most important things you can do. Where are people coming from? How did they hear about your community?
We’ve now made it much easier to gain deeper insight into IdeaScale users by giving you the ability to add questions (or custom fields) to a profile. Now you can add basic questions to the new user registration form. For example, you can ask your users such questions as ”What is your zip code?” or “What is your age?”. In addition, we’ve added the ability to export this user data out to an Excel spreadsheet for offline analytics.
To add custom fields to your users profile:
- Login to your IdeaScale.com community.
- Choose the community you’d like to edit.
- Click the “Settings” tab
- Click the “Custom Fields” link in the left navigation bar.
- Choose ”Add New User Custom Field” (or “Add New Custom Field” to add custom fields to an idea)
- Type in the label and choose the type of question.
- Done!
More Info:
Categories: Feature Enhancements
December 17, 2009 · 1 Comment
A very common request from our users is the ability to login from various outside identity providers – skipping the need for users to create another account. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by integrating with RPX. In addition to just OpenID, RPX provides the ability to login using various third parties such as Google, Yahoo, OpenID, AOL, and others.
We were very pleased with the ease of integration that RPX provided, as well as the flexibility of their sign-in widget. Now when new users visit your IdeaScale community, they’ll see familiar icons to login using their existing accounts. As you can imagine, this greatly streamlines the feedback process for your customers!
More Info:
Categories: Feature Enhancements · IdeaScale
We have made a slight change to how users login to the system. Starting November 1, 2009, you will need to use the email address on your account as your username. Passwords will remain the same and this change will not affect any of the surveys or data currently existing in your account. The only change you will need to make is to enter your email address in the username field when logging into the system.
After this change takes effect, changing your email address will also change your username. Please take a minute to confirm that the current email address on your account is one that you personally have access in the event you need to make a request for a new password. Again, this change will take effect November 1, 2009.
As always, any questions or concerns may be directed to our support team at: http://www.questionpro.com/info/contactUs.html
Categories: IdeaScale
In our continued effort to shorten URLs for our customers, we’ve made a minor change to IdeaScale URLs to make them shorter. This will have NO effect on any links to ideas that use the older URL – they will still work the same. An example of the new URL is below (‘akira’ has been removed):
http://openinternet.ideascale.com/a/dtd/17835-6017
Just to be clear: there is nothing that you need to do – old URLs will work just the same.
Categories: Best Practice · IdeaScale
In 1990, technology was about data. In 2000, technology was about intelligence. In 2010, what we need is for technology to be about wisdom. We learned early that despite the fact that data was “cool,” it wasn’t truly empowering. Intelligence, it was thought, would be empowering, actionable, and complete. Intelligence was certainly better than data so half of the promise was fulfilled. But the other half, was not- intelligence allowed us to take action but not to do so by incorporating more than a few of the myriad relevant dimensions. Wisdom is about a higher-order “intelligence” that allows us to make decisions based not only only the experiences of the past but also but on the fast-changing voltage of the present, and the sustainability of future states.
Am I right? Is wisdom the outcome we seek? Please comment below, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Romi Mahajan writes about turning data into Wisdom as part of Atigeo, a Bellevue, WA based company building a new breed of “intelligent” technology that connects disparate data in unique ways to create individualized interactions and experiences of unprecedented relevance.
Categories: IdeaScale
September 14, 2009 · 1 Comment
There is much talk about the healthcare bills that are being proposed in the press right now. However, one thing that has been bugging us is how difficult it is to understand what elements of health care reform are most important to people. We wondered, if one had to forgo a component of H.R. 3200 for another, what elements would it be?
Naturally we thought, “why not crowdsource it?” The end result is an IdeaScale community using our new “poker chip” style voting system.
The rules for this system of voting is simple:
- each user gets 30 votes that they can apply to any of the ideas.
- users can vote more than once – but only up to the allocated 30 votes.
- at any point you can re-allocate your votes if you change your mind.
We then broke up all the main parts of H.R. 3200 into their own ideas on the community. The resulting community allows each user to vote on a section of the bill, deciding which elements of the bill are most important to them.
Take a spin and let us know what you think!
More info:
Categories: Best Practice · Feature Enhancements
So we’re finally back from Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C. We had an amazing time meeting many of you and talking about the exciting opportunities ahead - Both for IdeaScale as well as many Federal and State/Local agencies feedback and crowdsourcing efforts to make Goverment a Platform.
I wanted to distill some of the conversations that we’ve had with many agency representatives and give all of you an idea of where we are and our future direction.
Free License for Civic Engagement
We’ve decided to formalize and operationalize an IdeaScale License tailored and designed specifically for Gov Agencies – Federal, State and Local. So far we’ve made this available on an Ad-Hoc and case by case basis, but as of today we will allow any Gov Agency to use IdeaScale for free – We are calling this the IdeaScale Civic Engagement License. Most of you on this list already have this license – but just in case details on this :
http://ideascale.com/opengov
Open ID – Single Signon – Integration
A recurring theme has been around OpenId/Single Signon using OpenID and Drupal. I have had personal conversations with many of you around this and want to let you know that we take this seriously. We will be putting our heads to work over the next couple of weeks to come up with a series of solutions. Our initial goal is to make IdeaScale work seamlessly with a Drupal Installation so users do not have to login multiple times. We will also be working on integrating with other OpenID providers (Google, Yahoo etc.) as well as other social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.
Best Practice and Recommedations
One of the themes that I heard was to create a specific set of guidelines and recomendations for best-practice for launching crowdsourcing initiatives. We have some internal recomendation (that work on the commercial side) but then like all good things – Gov Initiatives have their own set of challenges. I have talked to Lena Trudeau (NAPA) about sharing such details with with the rest of us so we all can learn from it. Here are some brief issues that we all should consider:
- Moderation Policy – Have a clear moderation policy and explain that to the end-user.
- Seed Ideas from an internal audience before launch
- Phased Rollout – Invite key (and trusted) members of the communitty to begin the engagement process and then roll it out to the larger userbase (blog post, twitter/fb update)
- Enable Twitter integration and create/resuse a hashtag. Monitor the twitter hashtag very closely.
Moderation Vs. Speech Suppression
This is obviosly a very sensitive issue and there are a few enhancements that we think we can do to make life easier for everyone:
- Have a link that displays all the ideas/comments that have been “flagged” – this will allow users to get to the flagged ideas, but they will not be visible on the front page.
- The same can apply to comments also.
Upload Vidoes / You Tube Integration
Another idea that was discussed was the ability for users to upload videos as part of the idea submission process. YouTube has an API and we probably can piggy back on that to allow for that functionality.
Some Implementations
Here are some links to implementations of IdeaScale that are live – this will give you an idea of how agencies are using IdeaScale. We have a few other projects that are on track, but since they are not public yet, we can’t share more. We will share more of them on next month’s update.
TOS Agreement with GSA
I know some of you are aware of this, but I wanted to point out and reiterate that IdeaScale and many other Web 2.0 sites – Flickr, YouTube etc. have signed a Terms Of Service Amendment Agreement with the GSA as a template for engagement with Federal Agencies. If your agency does not already have this executed with IdeaScale we’ve put a very simple and effecient process for doing this : Please send an email to usgovernment@surveyanalytics.com. So far the following Federal Agencies have ToS agreements:
- Executive Office of the President (EOP)
- General Services Admin (GSA)
- Federal Communication Commission (FCC)
- Department of Energy (DoE)
Apart from these Gov specific enhancements, we will be making many other enhancements from our own IdeaScale site (http://ideas.ideascale.com) – if you have ideas on improving IdeaScale please feel free to share them with us.
Finally, I want to thank all of you who have supported us through Gov 2.0 and for the wonderful conversations we’ve had. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.
Categories: Best Practice · IdeaScale
Rob Hoehn
Vivek Bhaskaran
