Month: May 2009

I’ve been working a bit lately with user-generated content – essentially the heart of ‘web 2.0’ – allowing people to not only consume, but also contribute to the experience.

In my daily reading, I came across this article from TechCrunch about Fixya – a product support site where other users provide the support.

What caught my eye were two items:

First, strung along with a few other metrics, they mention one way to gauge the quality of the interactions that your customers are having on the site:

75% of the answers are rated as ‘good’ or ‘excellent,’ with 50% answered within 5-6 hours of posting

It’s important for customers to be able to rate the information – and to be able see those ratings.  On an individual level, this helps when consuming the information to determine how you want to process it (how much credibility will you give it, etc.,).  En mass, it is a decent gauge for how your site is performing as a whole – are you actually solving a customer issue.

The second item was this note:

Interestingly, most questions are about usability issues rather than technical ones

This tells me that most customers find that products these days are either generally reliable or people just know to give up when there’s some kind of outright failure.  When was the last time you actually got something fixed?

Where people continue to have problems, and are continually frustrated, is in actually figuring out how to use the thing.  We may have come a long way in creating rugged materials and reliable electronics but we still have a long way to go in making products easy.