[Screens Around Town] .Mac, Twitter, Swerve Festival Aug 20
11 comments Latest by Ian
.Mac
Neat feature of .Mac web mail: Each line item in the inbox has a little reply icon. You can click that to send a quick reply. Just type text and hit Send. No need to bother with the to, from, subject fields…just type the reply and go.
Twitter
Twitter elicits better support queries with specific entry fields for “This is what I DID,” “This is what I EXPECTED to happen,” and “This is what ACTUALLY happened.”
Swerve Festival
This Swerve Festival screens has cool background images in the top, left, lower-left and lower-right corners. Along with the centered content, they give the page a neat, sorta old-fashioned picture-frame quality.
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11 comments so far
JD 20 Aug 07
The design of help desk software promotes soliciting better support queries. The software they use is HelpSpot.
http://www.userscape.com/helpdesk/index.php?pg=request
Ian 20 Aug 07
Hey, thanks for the mention guys. The Twitter folks really put HelpSpot through it’s paces (as you might imagine). It’s always nice to have a somewhat risky design decision validated.
Drew McLellan 20 Aug 07
The principal of collecting support requests or bug reports through those three steps is great. The best part is each question is so simple that it enables just about anyone to log a really good report.
We’ve found it so useful and to have such a dramatic impact that we wrote up a dedicated how to report bugs guide for our clients. Interesting to see the same ideas cooked into helpdesk software.
Des Traynor 20 Aug 07
The .mac thing certainly appears useful, but I struggle to think of a time that I would reply to something without reading it. It’s rare enough that the first 20 characters of a message are enough to determine your response.
Des
Christopher Hawkins 20 Aug 07
That Twitter screen has us cracking up over here at Cogeian Systems. That is EXACTLY what our home-built issue tracking system looks like when you’re adding an issue: what did you do, what happened, and what should have happened instead.
Clearly the folks at Twitter are readers of Joel on Software too; that’s where we got the idea.
gg Twitter! It’s awesome to see simplicity in an issue/bug tracking tool. Most such systems are way, way too complicated to be useful.
Christopher Hawkins 20 Aug 07
D’oh! I didn’t read that first comment – I see that it’s actually a HelpSpot screen.
No surprise there, Ian’s a sharp guy. gg UserScape!
ChrisFizik 20 Aug 07
re: twitter support questions
yep, I do the exact same sort of form for my in-house IT issue tracker …. it is the only way to get decent answers out of the users, and provide them a comfortable, technically-minimal support environment. I’ve also got some checkboxes and fields like that to narrow / categorize issues.
Jeroen Janssen 20 Aug 07
At my company we end the subject of e-mails with no body text with ‘END’. This way you know there’s no need to open the e-mail. This works great for ‘did you leave the refrigerator door open’ type of conversations.
The .mac thing might come in handy for that kind of messages.
Kevin Makice 21 Aug 07
I have used the Twitter form a couple of times, noting how simple the wording and cognitive groups are. However, both times it was not for a “something is wrong” kind of query, so it was a challenge to fit my questions into those fields. Since there was no similarly simple version for other requests, using the web form was a bit of a round peg in a square hole.
That shouldn’t take away from the great arrangement of the Twitter web help, but I thought it important to point out that it isn’t one size fits all.
nexusprime 21 Aug 07
Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t most issue tracking systems ask that?
I’m not sure I’d class it as a “risky” user interface choice, when I’ve seen it in FogBugz, LaunchPad, Microsoft’s Issue Tracking system & Bugzilla :)
Ian 21 Aug 07
I haven’t seen it Nexus, but I could be wrong of course. I don’t see it on the FB form at least by default: http://contact.fogcreek.com/
Same goes for Bugzilla which only has a description field by default: https://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-tip/enter_bug.cgi?product=deleteable (login required)
I couldn’t find examples for the other 2 so they may indeed have it. Also it may be possible to modify FB and Bug to do this, not sure.
Also those products are all bug trackers, HelpSpot is a help desk tool. I know that technical folks sometimes view these as the same thing, but I don’t believe they are and most formal help desks would never use a bug tracker for support. So what was really risky about it was that we took a bug tracking concept (we don’t claim to have invented the concept!) and put it in a product that is designed specifically for support.
If you look at other support tools like Remedy you won’t see this type of setup and that’s who we view as competition not the bug trackers.
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