launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Matthew Revell <matthew.revell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 5 July 2011 14:35, Nigel Babu <nigelbabu@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>> This sounds like a cool idea. We might want to make it possible for
>> people to say "Never ask me about any of these features at all, ever,"
>> just in case they're particularly cantankerous about such things.
>> Also, we should bear in mind that we're going to be interrupting their
>> workflow, so there may be one or two social pitfalls that we need to
>> negotiate to make this work nicely and to reduce complaints from
>> users.
>
> If this is limited to members of launchpad beta testers, you might
> have a more receptive audience to help. I don't know whats the ratio
> of beta testers to entire launchpad users though.  Just my 2 cents :)

That's a good idea. I have two concerns, though:

 * as a beta team member they may have seen the new version of that
page/feature already and we may want to get people when they're seeing
it for the first time
 * also, I'd worry that speak only to people who are sufficiently
engaged with Launchpad to join the beta team may skew the results.

I think that where this form of recruitment could be really useful is
in reaching those people who'd never read the blog, the identi.ca feed
or anything along those lines and who see Launchpad as nothing more
than a tool. Those people wouldn't be part of the beta team, they may
not have read the help wiki and they are the people who can give us
insights that we probably can't get elsewhere.

On 5 July 2011 14:57, Aaron Bentley <aaron@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Be careful how you do this.  If it looks like one of those pop-up "Would
> you like to take a survey about our site" messages, many of us will
> close it instantly.

Yes, and I almost always close them myself, so I'm conscious of how
annoying they can be and, perhaps, how they might actually work
against us recruiting those people who want to get real work done.
Perhaps we could make it clear in our wording that it's not just yet
another annoying survey :)

This picture shows how Bolt Peters do it:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/4218825627/

I like that there's a relatively unobtrusive chat window at the bottom
of the page. It's more to implement than a simple JS overlay, though.

-- 
Matthew Revell -- https://launchpad.net/~matthew.revell
Launchpad.net -- cross-project collaboration and hosting