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listening to our users

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My job is about listening to users, and translating what users tell me (either directly or indirectly) into actions that my app teams can take to make our apps better meet your needs.

As part of that, I've been analysing some of the feedback that we get about our help files [1]. Some of this is easy -- if everyone who submits comments about our help says that a particular topic isn't helpful, then my writing team has some work to do to try to make it better. But some of it is hard.

For example, here's one comment that we received about the help topic titled "About organising projects":

Show examples of projects. Use the birthday party example and fill it in. I don't understand what Entourage does. Still.

Great feedback -- this is really directed and tells me exactly what you want. It points to a discoverability problem with the Project Center: if you click on the Project Center button, there's nothing in there to help you get started, and the New Project Wizard doesn't really give you any information about why you might want to use the Project Center.

Here's another comment to that same help topic:

clipping

I have no idea what the user is trying to accomplish, and he hasn't given me enough information to puzzle it out.

So help me listen to you. Giving us feedback is really helpful to us. When you're in the help, just submitting the basic feedback about our help tells us a lot about where we need to make improvements. If you're going to enter comments, please be verbose: tell me what you're trying to accomplish and why the help doesn't meet your needs. If my team can't puzzle out what you're trying to tell us, we're going to move on.

[1] Whenever you use the help for one of our apps, there's a question at the bottom of the helpfile asking whether this was helpful. You can click "yes", "no", or "somewhat", and you also have the opportunity to type whatever you want to give us more details.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 04, 2008
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  • Anonymous
    September 05, 2008
    The comment has been removed