Summary of Changes in Connect v4.5 (Sep 2009)
I. Move from 5-star to up/down voting for bugs, suggestions and “other” feedback
We have moved to up/down voting for all of our feedback, and away from the 5-star voting process. This move was driven by broad confusion with our 5-star voting process, and to bring Connect in-line with other Microsoft online voting experiences (e.g., forums, galleries). The up/down voting process is a simple, scalable user experience that can be broadly applied in a consistent fashion across the various teams using Connect at Microsoft.
An up-vote or down-vote is a vote about the bug or suggestion’s relative importance. This is different from a validation (see below), which is a confirmation that the bug can be reproduced by the user. Teams will continue to use the voting and the validation data as inputs to their prioritization process.
All existing votes will be converted to up or down votes as part of the September release. Three-, four- and five-star votes will all be counted as up-votes; one and two star votes will be counted as down-votes. This conversion, and the fact we no longer display total votes or total “score”, will result in some changes in the sorting of feedback items.
Keep in mind that a user can only vote once. However they can change their vote at any time. We have provided tool-tips text on the up or down arrows to help the user understand their current voting status. Also, when a feedback item is created, an automatic up-vote will be registered on behalf of the feedback submitter.
(View a screenshot of the Feedback Details page for a view of the new up/down voting at the bottom of this page)
II. Changes to Validations
There has always been confusion about the relationship between validation and voting. While many people would like to see only one or the other, we do not believe this supports the various scenarios that teams at Microsoft want to enable. However, we do recognize that it is confusing, and we have made the following changes to validation to differentiate it from voting:
· Validation is only available for bugs. It is no longer used with suggestions. All existing validations for suggestions are no longer shown in the Connect UI
· Changed the wording – while the “validations” term is till shown in the search results view, we have removed it from the feedback item detailed view. We now say “X users can reproduce this bug” (where X = the number of users who have said they can reproduce the bug)
· We have moved the validation experience in the UI so it is distinct from the voting experience
· You can only validate a bug once, and you cannot “un-validate” a bug
(View a screenshot of Feedback Details page for a view of the new treatment of validations at the bottom of this page)
III. Consolidated conversations around a feedback item
Our September release visually consolidates, on the bottom of the feedback detail page, the various community “conversations” taking place around a particular feedback item. This includes:
· Comments – one of our goals is to maximize the community’s engagement / discussion on a feedback item. We felt that this could be best accomplished by having one conversation around the feedback item to include Microsoft, the submitter and the broader community. Prior to the September release, the “conversation” between Microsoft and the submitter were visually separate from the community comments – now all the comments are in one place in the UI, posted chronologically, with the most recent comments first. Comments from Microsoft are bolded to differentiate them from the submitter comments and the community comments
· Workarounds - this separate tab, next to the comments tab, is for the community to offer a “special type” of comment - alternative ways to achieve the desired result, despite the bug or without Microsoft implementing the suggestion. Prior to the September release, the workarounds were visually separate from other comments, which confused some people
· Validations - we have removed the ability to provide a comment with a “validation”. Users rarely leveraged this ability, and it was felt these comments could be added to the generic comment tab. The result is a simpler and cleaner UI
(View a screenshot of Feedback Details page for a view of the consolidated comments at the bottom of this page)
IV. Connection Search Experience
A number of enhancements were added to improve the search experience from within a Connection (the search experience across Connections - powered by Bing™ - is basically the same), and make it easier to find relevant feedback. While some of these enhancements are behind the scenes (e.g., more fields are indexed and searched for during the initial search), a few changes have a profound impact on the end-user experience:
1) One-click voting directly from the feedback search results – just hover over the up or down arrow and vote. Comments and validations still require going to the feedback detail page
2) Richer search results – all search results from within a Connection are displayed in a much richer and simpler UI, designed to display the information you care about in a simple and intuitive way
3) Search filter replaces advanced search – while Connect has always had advanced search capabilities, this feature was rarely used. We have brought this feature “front and center” -after an initial search, the user can further refine their search directly from the results page
4) Searching for a specific Feedback ID is done directly from the search box. No need to navigate to a special screen - just type the Feedback Id directly into the search box
(View a screenshot of the new richer search results and search filters at the bottom of this page)
Feedback Search Results Page:
Feedback Details Page:
