Feed(igg)back
| Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 | --Sean |
Online customer feedback collection is a pretty stagnant field. Users notice problems, they send a message through whatever public facing email address or web form is available, and the problem is (hopefully) magically solved behind the scenes. The users typically receive very little along the lines of status updates or validation of their complaint, and the company doesn't have a spectacular way to isolate the most important complaints/suggestions or to broadcast status updates to the people with similar issues. During one of their Hack Days, members of the Yahoo! Autos team decided that it was finally time to try to address this underappreciated problem of managing feedback.
Their solution? Diggback.
Digg has made a living out of harnessing the work of other people---the overall Internet populace---and applying that work towards solving a specific problem---aggregating interesting news---so it's fitting that the Yahoo! Autos engineers fully embraced this philosophy and harnessed all of the key concepts of Digg---the user-based rating mechanism, the per-item comments, and embarrassingly, even the yellow boxes---to put to work at organizing the suggestions and problems generated within Yahoo! Autos. Users submit feedback as usual, but it's placed in public view where other users can choose to agree with it, raising its prominence. As the developers work through the issues, they can provide comments to keep users in the loop. The result looks awfully derivative, but the application is novel, so, hey---I digg it.
October 18th, 2006 at 8:35 pm
[...] Hack Days have become a big deal within the engineer culture at Yahoo!, and no group exemplifies that more than Yahoo! Autos. They’ve actually worked the concept into their regular work schedule, holding their own Hack Days every 5 or 6 weeks and allocating up to 15% of their time to devote to creating and refining hacks. As a result, you can see a fantastic number of fun ideas coming to life on the Yahoo! Autos site. [...]