Summary of Feedback in June on Help Topics for Team Foundation 2010 (Beta 1)
Summary
There’s a small amount of feedback available. What’s New is the bright spot. Other feedback is on project management, and it’s bad, even though it has jumped to the top of the heap in terms of page views. Also
- translation problems are hurting satisfaction, even for What’s New.
- placeholders and half-baked content is not well received, even in Beta.
Details
We have a very small amount of data coming in on devuemetrix for Dev 10 Beta 1 content. The results are very mixed, but generally not good. Here’s the summary, filtered for stuff that we are writing (some of which is in the Team System bucket).
Drilling a little deeper, it gets interesting.
Team System
In Team System, we have three topics, all with relatively high page views. Two of the topics have feedback.
The top level Visual Studio Team System topic, which I updated to match the new TOC, has gotten really bad reviews. I just updated this to match the new TOC, but didn’t put much meat on the bone, so the results aren’t shocking. Still, it’s bad, so I’ve updated that topic to contain more conceptual material that is, hopefully, the kind of information that a user needs when he’s coming to VSTS for the first time, or coming back to the top of the help system to navigate into it.
What’s New, on the other hand, has a rating of 3.8, and one comment. The comment is actually a rating of 1, and it complains of a mistranslation. Filtered for English, it receives a 4.5 rating. That topic is definitely working in English.
(Our ratings overall generally run very close to 3.0).
Team Foundation
All of the feedback we’ve received so far in Team Foundation is on dv_TeamProject, which is also the most read section. Generally, TFSAdmin gets about 5 times as many page views as project management, so that’s an interesting change. The small amount of feedback on project management is universally bad, though, so that’s scary.
The ratings are spread out over four topics.
Two of these are placeholders for future content, something we haven’t done before. It looks like that may have been a bad idea. (Mine. Sorry for that.) We’ll have to watch this to see if it’s really impacting satisfaction. It’s not clear why the other two are getting low ratings. I looked at them and don’t see anything obvious. I also checked to make sure the ratings were coming from the English version, and they are. We’ll need to watch for trends.