Does the new Promote plan allow the removal of all the visual clutter on GetSatisfaction pages?

Hi Wendy,

I take it your reply means the new Promote plan does NOT provide an opportunity to strip our GS pages of unnecessary bells and whistles. Oh well.

When it comes to customer interfaces, I believe 100% in the "keep it simple, stupid" rule.

As a feedback tool, there are three things an interface (and my company) needs: User information fields, a comment field, and a submit button. (Granted you may want to require login and the like to prevent thread spamming.)

The GS interface is busy, busy, busy (it's not at all clear where your eye is supposed to fall on any GS page) and not especially intuitive. I found GS confusing when I first encountered it. It took me at least 6 or 7 visits to figure it all out — and I'm a UI, QA and customer care consultant. If my 65-year-old dad was taken to GS from a site where he was trying to get help, he'd flat-out give up. He's never going to learn a whole new interface just to ask a simple question, NOR SHOULD HE HAVE TO.

I think having related topics can be helpful, but the icons next to them are clutter. As I user, I shouldn't have to learn what a quote icon means, what a bullhorn icon means, what a lightbulb icon means, etc.

"How does this make you feel" I find useless. It's a toy. It serve NO purpose for the user, and provides no information to the receiver that can't already be gleaned from the message itself. The fact that GS strongly hints that your message is less likely to be seen without adding a "mood" is very off-putting. It requires the user to figure out what the "mood" is for, determine if it's required, and then sit there and think about how they want to use it. The fact that once you choose a face, it's suddenly sprung on you that you're now expected to sum up your feelings in words besides just makes me nuts. I can't fathom in what way this feature could possibly be useful. Subsequently, I can't imagine what use "The Mood In Here" could be to anyone.

Keywords can be useful for future searches, but they are not intuitive for the end user either. The user has to stop thinking about their specific problem and start thinking as they're an employee of the company they're contacting, who has been assigned to writing an FAQ. Keywords are not the end-user's responsibility, and the additional mental transaction is, again, off-putting. When I have a question about a product, I should not have to jump through all these extra hoops.

Some people may find the social networking tools useful. Personally, I find them to be nothing but noise. I'm going to get emails about this topic when something new is posted. I don't also need Twitter, Facebook, etc. (Why would I post a GS thread to Facebook? What does posting a GS thread to Facebook have to do with getting my questions answered? What could it possibly accomplish?) Now, maybe offering a choice — "How would you like to be notified when replies to this topic are posted?" — would be a good idea. Let the user choose email OR Twitter OR both. But just having twitter and facebook up there in the corner feels like GS is offering these options just because, well, everyone's doing it. "Gotta have the Twitter on your site or you're living in the dark ages."

The number of replies and people participating may be interesting to the manager of the thread, but I can't imagine its of any use to the users in the thread.

In short, the less that is required of the user, the better. And GS requires way, way, way too much.

HOWEVER, I will say that if you did something to VISUALLY SEPARATE all the "extras" from the "meat" of your pages, that would go a LONG way to alleviating the clutter. Keep the center column in white, and drop a darker background behind the other columns so users can "filter them out." Similarly, add a background to the "How does this make you feel" and "Add a comment/This answers the question" in the center column, so that users eyes are drawn to the CONTENT of the thread instead of having their attention split.

As I said before, I'm a UI/QA consultant, and I'm just over the bridge in Oakland. I'd be very interested in working with GS to make it better and provide different interface options (I'm sure there are those that don't mind what I consider clutter). I'm easy to work with — my ego isn't as big as it sounds when I'm on a rant... :)

I believe you can access my email if you're interested. I'd be happy to send a resume and samples of my work.