Hi Skritterers,

Lately I have noticed that ppl were asking for one and the same feature in different forum threads and with varying formulations (in this case additional Heisig mnemonics). What I'd therefore like to propose is the implementation of a new Skritter feature making the current development queue somehow more transparent: The ‘Development page’.

The ‘Development page’ would be a list of all ideas that have been proposed by the community or are on the agenda of the team separated into different ‘cases’. Those cases would be created by the team and consist of a meaningful headline, 2 or 3 sentences explaining the underlying idea and a link to the forum thread for further discussion. The cases now should be classified into ‘In development’, ‘In queue’ and ‘Being discussed’ and differentiated by color. Skritterers are now able to assign each of those cases an individual grade of importance; the average grade over all Skritterers would determine how high on the list a case ranks. For the team this would be an excellent overview of what the community would like to see implemented soon and, in turn, the community can see what is currently under development and discuss the cases.

Obviously the system does not work for implementations to maintain Skritter as a business (e.g. alterations to the payment page won’t rank high on a list like that and must be done separately), however, apart from that, it comes with huge advantages that might make Skritter even more successful.

Cheers
凯

I second this idea!

Totally agreed.

I agree with your idea but have a few reservations about it. A site called Smart.fm does what you are suggesting but a few issues exist with it on their site.

First just because you create a different section for ideas won't stop people from double posting ideas in that section or stop them from posting about their ideas in the forums.

Second it needs to be easy to find. The Smart.fm area is not. But you may not want this area viewable by potential members, as seeing a board with a list of issues people have, may scare them off.

Third just because it is a great idea that everyone loves doesn't mean it will be implemented. The number one requested feature for Smart.fm was a way to practice Kanji by writing. Smart.fm said it would not benefit students studying other things like Geography and be too difficult to do. However in a post about it someone mentioned this site. So I tried out Skritter and decided it was worth my money to join. It would be nice to know what the Skritter's teams priorities and goals are, why they choose them (also why they may choose not to do some goals), and how long they think it will take to reach those goals.

In your mind, does it look like this?
http://feedback.uservoice.com/forums/1-product-feedback
http://feedback.smart.fm/forums/27076-a-suggest-features
I am still undecided about something like this, as "how many people want it" is only one criteria in choosing what to work on (others including difficulty, fit with other features, whether it can help market Skritter, etc.). But with the crazy traffic the forum's been getting the last few days, maybe this would be a good outlet.

That looks quite similiar to what I was suggesting, however, its not totally the same.

1) The smart.fm page looks quite confusing, I prefer the clear Skritter look. (TBH: I had the look of the queue insertion in mind - when vocabularies are accepted but not yet inserted)

2) Not the users but the Skritter team should be the ones creating the cases. Thereby you avoid double-posts and secure the quality of the case description.

3) Updates for a case are not attached to the case but its forum thread, thereby ensureing the clear look of the development page (also no "comments", "created by" or "Status" (This comes by case-color))

4) Cases are not linked to the number of votes but to their quality: Votes are made by a dropdown/select field from e.g. 1-10. As soon as a case has more than x votes (x must be set according to total Skritter users) they are able to rise in the ranking system.

@Nick: As I already mentioned it won't help in business related issues. But if any other criteria such as difficulty are important to you as well, you might consider giving each case a "case-factor" similar to the factors of a balanced score card that determines how easy it can climb the ranks.

These are just my ideas, perhaps other Skritterers have other thoughts?

I think this would definitely be a nice thing to see. Even as it was as simple as the Skritter team posting their goals for skitter list. Voting and ranking and all that would be nice too, but even just being able to see the would be helpful.

I would love to just make a version of our development plan Wave public and maybe add some yes/no/maybe gadgets or something for each item. But somehow not everyone has Wave or uses it every minute yet!

What you describe sounds pretty swell--well thought out! It would require a fair bit of elbow grease, though, which is in high demand. Unless we moved over to another bug/feature tracking system that we could just make public (we currently use FogBugz); sounds like something similar could be done with one of those.

Nick, count me in-- murrayjames@googlewave.com

P.S. I have a whopping 18 invites, if any of you Skritter folk are interested!