Perhaps a Better Way for Smugmug to Plan Features?

Jason Dunn

I've been a Smugmug user for a few years now, and one of the constant tension I see is that Smugmug has the difficult task of absorbing a lot of feedback from users through these forums, help desk requests, the blogs, etc...and then trying to figure out what things they should work on to fix the problems and enhance the customer experience.

How do they do that? I'm guessing there might be some sort of basic tool for categorizing feedback into broad buckets, and every staff member has a "feel" for what's important to the community based on what they read/hear, but I'm suggesting there might be a better way:

http://www.uservoice.com/

This is a new service, based around a Digg/Dell Ideastorm concept where people vote on what's important to them. I think Smugmug could use this service to really get a handle on what customers want to see next, and it would give customers a highly actionable place to make their own suggestions. Right now great ideas get posted to these forums, get a bit of attention, then get swept away. UserVoice would give ideas an opportunity to float/sink based on Smugmug user opinions.

Andy

Jason Dunn wrote:

Right now great ideas get posted to these forums, get a bit of attention, then get swept away.

Nothing gets swept away, I can assure you We take great care to bottle up what we hear, here, and use it.

uservoice looks interesting - we'll check it out

Thanks so much for sharing this, Jason!

Jason Dunn

Andy wrote:

Nothing gets swept away, I can assure you We take great care to bottle up what we hear, here, and use it.

Sorry, I meant that the idea gets swept away by newer ideas and comments in the forums, not that Smugmug does any sweeping. It's just the natural course of community forums. The "Feature Request" thread helps somewhat, but most people aren't going to read through all 14+ pages of comments to comment on what other people are saying.

havanese

Jason Dunn wrote:

but most people aren't going to read through all 14+ pages of comments to comment on what other people are saying.

Like the video thread...

Baldy

Very interesting, Jason, I'm gonna dive in and see what we learn. I put a little easter egg in the pages of free trialers that some would see on their second day, offering them an Amazon gift certificate in exchange for letting me call them.

I made 50 calls and what astounded me is how different what I heard was from what we read here. We love what we read here, don't get me wrong, and we spend hours poring over it, but here's what we heard from people taking the trial:



The features that those of us advanced enough to get on a forum like this love caused good free trialers to bail. We need to hide some of the more advanced features until the user becomes advanced enough to want them.

Moral of the story: many avenues of getting into customer heads are great by me.

jfriend

Baldy wrote:

Very interesting, Jason, I'm gonna dive in and see what we learn. I put a little easter egg in the pages of free trialers that some would see on their second day, offering them an Amazon gift certificate in exchange for letting me call them.

I made 50 calls and what astounded me is how different what I heard was from what we read here. We love what we read here, don't get me wrong, and we spend hours poring over it, but here's what we heard from people taking the trial:



The features that those of us advanced enough to get on a forum like this love caused good free trialers to bail. We need to hide some of the more advanced features until the user becomes advanced enough to want them.

Moral of the story: many avenues of getting into customer heads are great by me.

This may sound like mom and apple pie, but here goes anyway...

My design goal was always that: "First, simple things have to be simple". If you aren't there yet, then stop and go back until you are. Then, "more powerful things have to be discoverable and easy". Just because something is for more sophisticated users is no excuse that it doesn't need to be straightforward to discover, understand and use. When less sophisticated users migrate into the more powerful features, that's when your products really get sticky and your users get really loyal. They can't imagine doing this kind of stuff in some competitor's product. They are proud of how much they can get done.

As one of those frequent proponents of adding more powerful features, I would still agree that simple things at Smugmug need to be simpler. But the magic is finding a way to accomplish that without keeping more powerful features from being incrementally discoverable and still easy and efficient to use for those who have moved up to them.

It generally requires some layers to the UI for progressive discovery, sometimes newbie modes are good. Sometimes presets to choose from are good. More of an ability to learn about features in the UI is good (especially in web UIs). More "just do what I asked" implementations like you just did with watermarks rather than making the user know how to actually apply watermarks that they just turned on. Etc...

renstar

Baldy wrote:

You've posted this before. How do you enter your name and address into that Apple application?

Edit: I realized that came off as sort of snarky. My bad. My point is that sometimes super simple is not a good idea if it a) isn't clear what the UI does and b) you can't do what you need to do in the UI.

Baldy

jfriend wrote:

My design goal was always that: "First, simple things have to be simple". If you aren't there yet, then stop and go back until you are. Then, "more powerful things have to be discoverable and easy".

Probably our biggest win of the last year is SmugMungous because it just does the right thing for you and your display area without you having to think.

The downside is that people don't discover it if they don't stretch their browser, so they come and go without experiencing the feature they may enjoy above all others.

The biggest flop was probably our effort to embed ICC profiles because explaining it to people who it confuses is a nightmare, and often they just conclude that we don't understand color. But maybe some people are noticing it as a good thing and they assume we know they like it.

papajay

Baldy wrote:

Probably our biggest win of the last year is SmugMungous because it just does the right thing for you and your display area without you having to think.

The downside is that people don't discover it if they don't stretch their browser, so they come and go without experiencing the feature they may enjoy above all others.

The biggest flop was probably our effort to embed ICC profiles because explaining it to people who it confuses is a nightmare, and often they just conclude that we don't understand color. But maybe some people are noticing it as a good thing and they assume we know they like it.

Baldy:

It's like being a tight-rope walker without a net, isn't it? Feature-"less" photo storing/sharing sites like Snapfish have the benefit of being easy for "regular folks" to quickly sign-up and immediately use the full-range ( ) of what the site offers.

When my Snapfish-minded" family and friends compare what they have to what I have as a SmugMug user, they immediately "oooo and aaaahhh". So I used to think..."no problem", I'll just introduce them to SmugMug, "convert" them, and life will be grand!

To my "shock" and dissappointment, only a handfull to-date (after two years) have followed through. And I'm pretty sure it's not the cost of the SmugMug's service that has kept them from becomming Smuggers...it's the daunting learning curve newbies (partiularly those who are not computer-ites) face with so many choices*.

*Different Themes, Styles, Shares, Maps, and so-on, and need I mention one of my personal favorites, , Hello Wolrd/Smuggers. Wow! for many or us, that's an awful lot to absorb in the first attempt to "set-up" one's SmugMug site.

A less intimidating front-end interface...perhaps just a simple choice between:
A. "I'm a geek, let's dive-in...show me, SmugMug, what you've got!"...or
B. "I barely know how to turn on a computer. So, hold my hand please, and help me get my first gorgeous gallery online in less than 10 minutes!"
...would potentially "ease" the Type-B's into the SmugMug community without alienating the Type-A's.

The initial "set-up" for Type-B's should get them online with virtually everything preset in a "default" mode (SmugMug Style, Carbonite Theme, etc) with no mention of all the other "options" that will ultimately be available to them until sometime after they successfully get a gallery/site up and running.

All the bells and whistles are great, but overwhelming I think, to a large segment of potential SmugMug customers. I had to learn how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide before anyone ever even mentioned such things as algebra and calculus that would become part of my future.

By the way, I have NO IDEA what embedding "ICC profiles" is all about, so you lost me completely on that one.

claudermilk

papajay wrote:

To my "shock" and dissappointment, only a handfull to-date (after two years) have followed through. And I'm pretty sure it's not the cost of the SmugMug's service that has kept them from becomming Smuggers...it's the daunting learning curve newbies (partiularly those who are not computer-ites) face with so many choices*.

Don't forget the power of inertia. It takes work to shift from one photo hosting service to another. Even if some of them are impressed with SM & would like to use it, the idea of the work involved in moving may be stopping them.