Last week we sent out an AAC survey. Thanks to all of you who took the time survey, especially because the survey itself had a few funky bugs in it (oops - never a good idea to have the survey itself be buggy!). We got almost 300 responses.
I'll be doing a series of questions over the next couple weeks about the features we'll be building in response to the comments. For this one, I just wanted to summarize the general messages that came through:
- Performance. I wasn't surprised to see this, but actually we made significant improvements to performance just the week before the survey was sent out. For about 1-2 months before that, we had big problems, and I think that's what we heard about in the survey. I think we're past them and I'll keep a close eye on it so it doesn't happen again. We have some improved analytics (dogslow) so we'll have a quicker turnaround time if performance issues creep back.
- Searching. This was loud and clear - maybe even the #1 comment. I believe we have a way to improve this, certainly a start. Check out ANSWERS-448. Rather than replace Answers search with Google, I'd like to take the JIRA approach and give specific ways to filter content in a much more granular set of controls. Would love to get thoughts as that gets rolled out. We'll take an agile approach and keep iterating on it. ANSWERS-448 is probably about 3-4 weeks away.
- Tagging. Tagging has gone a bit crazy. We'll work on cleaning up Answers tags (if you care to weigh in I'll likely incorporate any tag change suggestions). As soon as we've done an initial cleanup and put things into buckets that make sense, we'll open up the ability to merge tags. That feature is already implemented, it's just set to 100,000 karma right now. We'll lower it once that tags are in a somewhat usable state. Hopefully this can happen through this week and next week.
- Atlassian Staffing. It was resounding that most people on Answers (a) expect their question to be answered always or almost always, and (b) really want a strong presence from Atlassian. That's good, because we're hiring for dedicated Answers staff! We're starting with development support, as that's the most complex, with the most need. See the job descriptions, either in San Francisco or Sydney. We'd love to hire people with experience building Atlassian plugins and who already like working with the community. Please apply!
- Subscriptions. The next most common set of comments was around the noise level in the bigger tags (like jira-development). We'll offer better, more granular subscription options. See ANSWERS-381 for a start.
- Accepting Answers. Answerers aren't getting the karma they deserve! This one's a bit tricky, as we also got a few comments that Atlassian should not be accepting answers on peoples' behalf. For now we'll start with:
- a reminder to questioners about accepting answers,
- allow accepting answers straight from an email, and
- post the accept rate in a more visible location.
- We're also in the midst of doing bounties, which will include an auto-accept with enough up-votes.
- Site Organization. We got a handful of comments about distinguishing development from usage questions. It'll be a couple months until we get to this, but we will get to it after the ones above. Down the road we'll tackle creating spaces to organize the info better.
There's a lot to do! Thanks again for the survey results. Hopefully as we iterate through this over the next couple months you'll see improvements. Please comment here or on any of the JIRA issues linked above. You can add the 'answers' tag to your favorite tags. I'll post questions about various implementation decisions as we go.
