Easier on the eye

Thank you for the increased room to write, the tiny box of the old widget was frustrating.

What's unclear in the new one, however, is that there is an opportunity to leave further feedback.  It's presented as a yes/no question only.

I've seen but haven't interacted with the new widget yet, does the further comments box appear regardless of if you pick yes or no?

Hello Doug,

Thanks for sharing your feedback on the new widget. With the new design, our highest priorities were to ensure the box was visually "present" but not obtrusive. The idea with the 2-stage approach is to encourage customers to vote in the first place, so that we have an accurate idea of how helpful our articles are perceived to be, then for those who would like to share some verbatim comments, present a text box to share further comments. To answer your question, the comments box does appear whether the vote was a "yes" or a "no".

We look forward to hearing more feedback from you !

Have a comment box with "Helpful?" and "Yes" and "No" at the bottom. If they don't type anything the entry is a null, but if there is a comment, they still have to 'vote' to submit it.

Whoever is doing the UI work needs to let someone else do this. There are too many hurdles in PTC related software that aren't necessary.

Hello David,

Thank you for sharing these perspectives. The 2 suggestions you've made (minimize verbiage and keep one single widget) are aligned with the approaches we took, and each were considered as part of the recent redesign.

While ultimate simplicity is our aim, some trade-offs needed to be made this time.

- Inviting feedback with just the word "Helpful?" would have saved valuable space. Unfortunately it would not work as well in all the languages we translate the widget into, so we reverted to asking whether the document was helpful in the source text, before sending to translation.

- Having a single box with comments inline is attractive in that it saves an additional step, but does have the drawbacks that the logic/flow to leave feedback would not be as intuitive, and space to enter comments would be more limited.

Your viewpoints are helpful, and we'll keep these in mind when we make the next major update to our back end web technologies for the eSupport portal.

With new technologies, it's likely we will have more opportunities to better utilise the available space on the page, and further increase simplicity of use.

Question for you (and Doug, and anyone else who feels as passionate about the eSupport user experience as we do): Would you be willing to be involved in one or two calls as part of the review process in the next design round ?

"Helpful?" was a typing shortcut. I was referring to the process, not the specific verbiage.

And no, the approach is not aligned with my suggestion as the PTC approach compromises the essential element of a UI, which is the ability of the User to discover what the interface will do. You've made two widgets when only one is needed.

What limits the size of the widget? I have a 1920 x 1024 screen on the laptop, and the work machine has a pair of monitors that are almost 4 feet by 1.5 feet. That's a lot of room for a modal widget.

David,

The widget is a fixed number of pixels. This is what our back end technology allows today, and we're looking forward to being able to make the widget size responsive in the future, which for your screen would mean more room for text.

The current size was decided based on data we collect on browser and screen width across the entire customer base.

Our future back end may also enable us to have a "single" widget, provided the flow for expected user input is coherent.

Peter.

Check out Fog Bugz. I've been catching up on Joel's blog posts where he talks about the 2 weeks he too to add a screen grabber that imported directly to the bug reports. That was in 2008, so things should be better since then.

Bug Tracking and Issue Tracking - FogBugz