10 posts tagged “feedback”

Earlier this year we made several changes to Vox, including simplifying the navigation, adding "Explore" areas to help you discover new people and content, as well as some modifications to the logged-in homepage.

After that release, we heard from some of you through Vox feedback and comments on blogs that you weren't too happy with the changes we made to the homepage. There were a few recurring themes in the feedback you gave: You missed having a quick and easy at-a-glance view of all the latest activity in your neighborhood, and you really felt like the Question of the Day and Vox Hunt should live together. And you know what? We agree.

So today, we've updated the logged-in homepage so that it's much easier for you to scan recent comment activity, posts and other updates from your neighbors without having to click. We've also joined the Question of the Day and Vox Hunt at the hip so you only have to look in one place to find inspiration.

We hope you'll find the homepage redesign faster and easier to use. But please: Let us know what you think so we can continue to make sure you're getting the most out of your Vox experience.

And again: Thanks for all the feedback. Keep it coming!

Thank you so much for all of the feedback you gave on our latest release.  We've read all of your comments to the post and the messages you've sent to our help team via the Feedback link and we really appreciate that you took the time to let us know not only your concerns, but also the things that are working for you.  Obviously we're not able to act on every request, but we want you to know that we do read and consider each and every piece of feedback we’re given and that we’re constantly working to make sure your Vox experience is the best it can be.

You gave us some really useful suggestions, and based on that we are hoping to make adjustments and changes in the following areas:

1. QotD: Those of you who look to QotD for daily inspiration have let us know that you prefer it to be closer to the top of the page.  We're going to see if we can find a better placement for it in the coming weeks.
2. Neighborhood Update module: Many of you let us know that you miss the at-a-glance usefulness of the old design. We want you to be able to find the things you love on Vox, and we’ll do our best to ensure that happens.
3. The [this is good] module:  It has been around since Day One, so we knew that many of you would miss it. Unfortunately, we have no plans to bring it back, but we would like to incorporate your favorite aspects of the old [this is good] into our new editorial sections on the Explore pages.  Please use the links on each editorial feature to send us suggestions of posts, photos, videos and Voxers you’d like to see featured there.

A note on what we're not bringing back: the drop-down menus. Some people miss them and others were glad to see them go. We spent a lot of time designing a navigation geared towards a seamless user experience. For those of you who were used to having the drop-down menus, we hope that after you give the new navigation some time, it'll become more comfortable for you to use.

It's going to take us some time to work out the details on how to implement some of these changes, and we appreciate your patience while we do so. You'll start to see some changes in our next release and other changes will roll out in future releases.

Please continue to let us know what you are thinking (good and bad) by using the Feedback area. (We know the Feedback and Help pages still feature the old design, but the information you send still gets right to us!) We aren't able to respond to every comment or piece of feedback, but using Feedback helps us keep all your comments in one place so we don't miss anything important.

Letting us know what you’re thinking allows us to continue to make Vox the place where you go to explore, create and connect.

The Vox community has grown in part because of the great feedback we've receive from Voxers — that includes you! Thanks to your feedback, Vox has made many improvements over the past year since our official launch.

We continue to welcome all kinds of feedback. Your contact to our team could include:

• ideas for features you want to see in the future
• suggestions about improving features you’re already using
• reports of problems you're having with certain parts of Vox

For instance, let's say you want to see more options added to a feature. If you have a specific idea of what you're looking for, or you see an improvement that could make a feature more convenient, let us know. Just click the Feedback link that's located on the bottom of every Vox page footer, and you'll be sent to a page where you can enter your ideas and suggestions. Pick a category for your feedback and type your feedback into the text box.  Be sure to be as specific as you can - this helps us understand how the improvement could benefit you and other people here at Vox!
 

Another reason why you might need to contact us using the Feedback page is if you start experiencing a problem or error with a certain Vox feature. (How frustrating!)  Again, details are especially helpful if you are having a problem, because it will help us identify more quickly what you are seeing.  You might be able to solve the problem yourself with a little advice from the Vox team, or we could discover it's caused by a bug in the system. Check out our Reporting Errors or Bugs article for more information on how to send in a report to us.

We always encourage you to search the knowledge base for more help on any area of Vox. To get to the knowledge base, click the Help link on the top control strip from any page. Then type in some key words or phrases into the "search for info" box and see what results pop up. Then if you still have a comment or question, feel free to use Feedback to let us know.

The Feedback page is the best way to let us know what's on your mind, and we love to hear from you. The ideas, suggestions, and reports you send in can help make Vox an even more user-friendly place to be. We consider and value each message we receive, whether or not we send out a personalized reply - we get so many that we aren't able to reply to each! We take many thoughts and opinions into consideration to better the community as a whole for the future.

Whatever you have to tell us, just know that we're happy to hear from you.  Help the Vox community come together even more, and send that feedback on over!

-- Vox Help team 

Comment Reply Notifications Are Here!
All of us on Team Vox are really excited about this, so we know you will be too.  Now when someone replies directly to one of your comments, we'll send you an email notification.  No more worries that you'll miss what someone wrote to you (or your chance to respond directly).  We look forward to how this change will help keep your conversations flowing and help you connect with like-minded Voxers.

Changes in Blog Navigation
Inconsistencies in navigating around Vox can be confusing, and up until now viewing things like photos or audio worked differently in groups than it does on your blog. So we've just made them more consistent by consolidating all the blog navigation links into one strip.  As a plus, the new blog navigation takes up less space and is located underneath your blog header, making your own design more prominent on the page.

This additional space in your design might inspire you to create a new custom theme.  If you'd like to upload a new custom theme or need to tweak your existing one, read the Help article Personalizing your blog's design.  And if you want to tweak your blog title or tag line, just click over to the Design area.

As always, we're open to feedback and constructive criticism and love hearing how we can keep iterating and making improvements -- hit the Feedback link at the bottom of the page to share your thoughts.

Speaking of Your Feedback…

We've been listening to what you've told us recently and here are a few ways we've incorporated your feedback in this release:

• Set your privacy level on the Recent Updates!:  You can choose who to share your activity with (anyone, no one, neighborhood, friends & family, friends or family) by going to Account > Privacy & Defaults. 
  
• Updates to the neighbors module:  We've removed the tagline from the Neighbors module on your blog's sidebar.  You'll be able to see everyone's taglines when you click through to view the neighbors page.
• Tags are back!:  We've returned tags to be viewable on your blog posts.  They'll display below each post or asset near the link to comments.  

Improvements To Explore
Have you ever searched on a tag like "food" and wanted to see posts, photos and videos about it all at the same time?  We just improved the Explore experience so that it shows you relevant photos, posts, audio, video and books for anything you search on.  Of course, if you want to see search results on just one type of asset (videos tagged "food" for instance) just click on "video" above the search box to filter the results.

New Release, New Themes!
Big news for Groups:  we've just made all blog themes available as group themes as well!  Pick a new theme in the Design area.

We've also added some brand new themes.

(L to R): Hanafuda July, Hanafuda August, Hanafuda September, Hanafuda October, Draft Blue, Draft Brown, Ragged Torch, Subway Black, Subway White. 

And to get you excited about the upcoming VH1Eyecandy conduit, they've released some of their own themes including Heels, Pink, Trio, Hearts, and Shorts.  Look for them under the "New" tab in Design.

-- Krissy

We love getting your feedback about Vox, and we're always intrigued to find out new ways that Vox is helping people stay connected to what's important to them.

Last week we got this letter from Voxer Sgt. Stephen M. DeBoard that really touched us, and we were thrilled to have gotten permission to share it with you all:

Dear Vox,

Just wanted to drop you a line and thank you for Vox. I ran a few websites back in my civilian days, and as a public affairs chief I ran the suggestion up the chain that maybe the best way to communicate with families during our year-long tour in Iraq's Al Anbar Province would be a blog. It's highly-recognizable and something most people are used to seeing.

We were going to set one up from scratch -- CSS, HTML, the whole nine yards. But I read an article about Vox in the March 2007 Wired magazine and decided to take a poke. I love it. We've been putting flash versions of our video productions up there. We're still getting the families and Marines involved in the site but we're hoping this takes off. We plan on having the little one-minute video snippets that most digital cameras take nowadays up on the site of Marines on patrol and the like in addition to our public affairs products.

But the real point is thanks for making a simple interface for even the uninitiated to take one look at and love. Even the Marines who aren't great with computers loved the Vox blog in seconds. Even on our very low satellite bandwidth Vox loads like a dream, which is surprising since I figured we'd have some problems with the AJAX.

Nice work!

Sgt. Stephen M. DeBoard

Classification:  UNCLASSIFIED

Check out the Fightin' 6th Marines' Vox blog to see their photos, videos and stories.  They are also looking for your feedback!  In one of their latest posts, they ask: "What do you want to hear about? Current operations? Efforts of Iraqi Police? Iraqi schools? Let this site serve as a clearinghouse for requests for information about RCT-6. The purpose of this site is to enable two-way communication between the regiment and the public. Talk to us about what you want to see or hear."

Go visit their blog to let them know what you're curious about, and add them to your neighborhood to let them know you're listening!

- Krissy

We're always listening and responding to your feedback, but we realize you don't always know when you've affected our plans and progress.  So today we'd like to point out a few ways you've influenced some changes that are coming soon.

Neighborhood Page

In the last release, we made some changes to the Neighborhood page, and heard back that some of you had lost functionality you'd come to rely on.  Over the coming weeks, we're going to make the following changes to the way the Neighborhood page currently displays:

• Display 60 neighbors per page, rather than just 30
• Allow you to search your Neighborhood page
  
• Allow you to filter your Neighborhood page by relationship, to view all neighbors, friends and/or family

Hopefully these changes will make the updated Neighborhood page more functional for you.  Read more about Neighbors and connecting in general in the Connecting to Neighbors article.

Email Changes
We also received feedback from several users that the change we made to the "From" field in several email notifications was causing the emails to land in spam folders.  D'oh!  Because of this, we've just rolled back the changes and the emails will resume being sent from vox at sixapart dot com.  We're going to research better ways to possibly implement the "from" field changes in the future.   

We get lots and lots of feedback, and sometimes we have to make tough choices about what we can implement and when.  So while we can't guarantee we'll always give you exactly what you ask for, we are listening!  And we love positive feedback too, so let us know when you love something!  

The best place to share your feedback with us is by using the Feedback link at the bottom of each page.

And now we're all going to count down the minutes til our three day weekend starts get right back to work.  Happy (early) President's Day everyone!

-- Krissy  

Things may have seemed a little quiet around here since our public launch back in October, but Team Vox is still hard at work making changes and improvements to the site and service.

Those of you who were with us before our official launch are used to regular changes and updates every few weeks.  That was an important part of the development of Vox and it will continue to be a vital characteristic of Vox going forward.

For those of you who have created a Vox account in the last few weeks, we wanted to give you an idea of how much Vox has changed since the beginning.  Just look at a few versions of what our home page used to look like!

Change is constant here, and Vox is alive and growing so we continue to value your feedback.  Next week will bring two new releases for Vox including holiday themes and some new features and functionality.  In honor of the upcoming changes, we wanted to give you some reminders and tips for sharing your feedback and suggestions.

In the beginning, we asked you to post feedback to your blog and tag it "vox", but now that the Vox community is so large, that's just not a good option anymore.  It's also not a good idea to send private messages to the Team Vox blog or any individual member of the team.

The best way to share feedback is to click on the Feedback link in the footer to go directly to this page. 

We welcome all types of feedback;  maybe you have a specific feature you think would make Vox better, or you're seeing something that looks buggy (please include lots of details) or you might just want to describe what you love best about Vox so we can know what to continue improving.

Stay tuned for detailed release notes next week, and we look forward to your feedback!

--Krissy

Your feedback is very important to the development of Vox, and we want to hear from you whether you've just signed in to Vox for the first time or you've been around from the beginning. Each member has a unique perspective that is valuable to us. You can always access the feedback area from inside of Vox - just click Help at the top of your screen, and then on the Help page, click "Share your Feedback".

What kind of feedback do we want? If you've been thinking that some feature would really improve your Vox experience, then please tell us about it. We have a list of known issues that we are already looking forward to working on, but we welcome feedback on any aspect of Vox. We look at feature requests that we get and use those ideas to help plan the features that will enhance Vox.

If you believe you've encountered a bug in Vox, then we definitely want to hear about that. When you're reporting a possible bug, it's useful to include some basic information in your feedback such as the browser and operating system you're using and the steps that led you to the problem, so that we can try to reproduce the problem and find a fix.

We don't reply to every feedback request, but your questions and suggestions do influence the articles in our Knowledge Base, which is constantly being updated. Also, please note that while we read all the comments you leave on these Team Vox posts, the best place to communicate your feature requests is still in feedback.

Thanks for making Vox such a wonderful place!

-- Kristine and the Vox Help team

Last week, I was briefly interviewed by Jason Kottke about Vox's QotD feature. You can read the interview over here. We've written about the Question of the Day on Team Vox before, but I figured that since we've let so many new people in lately, it was worth talking about again.

As I said in the interview over at kottke.org, the Question of the Day came about sort of accidentally. There was a need to have some sort of call to action on the main dashboard page and a feature that helped people get over the writer's block that is so common in blogging. So, the QotD was born.

We've seen that the most popular posts -- or rather, the posts that get the most responses -- have some sort of nostalgia factor to them. The "what was your favorite childhood candy" was the first indicator of that. Nostalgia and the ability to quickly associate an image with a post are clearly the winners for most answered questions.

However, one surprisingly popular answer was the one from this past Monday. The question about family roots and genealogy had far more responses than we imagined. In fact, not only was it answered by a great numer of Vox users, but the answers were incredibly thought-out with a couple paragraphs written on average. I know, for me, this was the question that I read every single answer. I love learning about family histories. Some really interesting ones were Anil's, Andy's, Lane's and Yoz's.

We're incredibly happy by the uptake of QotD. In the planning stages, we realized that with neglect, this feature could be our albatross. However, the excitement shown by our users has made us want to take QotD and make it even better. Look for more enhancements in upcoming releases.

But, for now, I'm totally interested in knowing what sort of questions you all like answering most. More nostalgia? More daily lives stuff? More serious questions? More media-related? Let me know. And if you have a question, post it here. If we use it, we'll give you credit in the QotD box.

-Mena

Hello Comet Alpha members! We're so pleased to have you here. :)

We wanted to give you a quick update on feedback within the system, because we've seen some questions about how and where it should be submitted.

Our team reads through the feedback on a daily basis. Your feedback is very important, especially at this early stage. We like to hear from you! Tell us what you want to see in Comet. Share what you do and don't like about it. Let us know what you had for lunch. ;)

Some feedback requires additional information and we may follow up with you, in order to file a case, whether it's a feature request or a possible bug.

While we try to read all of your feedback posted on your blogs, the number of Comet members is growing each day, and so we'd like to ask that you please use the Feedback link at the top of the window. We also receive feedback when you rate articles within our Knowledge Base. If you notice a step missing in an article, or something we could make better, please let us know by rating the article.

Tip: Keep an eye on Known Issues for the latest information on Comet. You may even want to bookmark this page.

Thank you for your continued help with submitting feedback and testing!

-- Comet Help Team