Answer for: What else could Modwest do to help its clients succeed?
#2 Provide a Forum where we can help
each other
Self explanatory really. It's a thing that will raise questions and supply answers and be a potential source of feeback material.
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Hi Delta19, we hope this forum will be one where customers can communicate with Modwest staff, but also with one another. Do you think the Modwest feedback community can be the sort of forum where Modwest customers can help each other?
We can but try, as trying is the only way to know for sure.
http://blog.grupthin...th-grupthink/
"We don’t really know… yet."
"Grupthink is a discussion platform that allows people to harness community-powered feedback."
^^ At this time I have a number of reservations based on my knowledge and experience of some uncommon things.
A brief perusal of a larger Grupthink community with much more content and a better layout than we have here suggests some things work well while others don't, and some subconscious incubation of thought is required in order to address those that don't.
I'll attempt to answer your loaded question constructively and honestly irrespective of the risk it might make make me somewhat unpopular.
At the time of posting my answer I was thinking that a forum such as vbulletin or phpBB3 would be better for inter-customer communication and feedback. These mature forums are familiar environments, more user friendly, more flexible, easier to manage and have no need for a joined up authentication system ;) In my experience their free form encourages more relaxed discussion and this in turn helps generate ideas and information but in a way that doesn't place time limits on editing, restrictions on what may be quoted and provides for a richer formatting of that content, bold, colour, strikethrough, underline, etc all of which help convey meaning; though I do think a good taxonomy is important.
That said my reservations lie not so much the user interface experience, but with the voting system and a lack of a game plan. How do you know the feedback is good? What feedback has mileage? What's possible? What's marketable? Where to focus your limited resources for maximum return? How are you going to efficiently manage the innovation process from feedback/idea to all the way to successful and appropriate response or product?
Certainly not by ranking arbitrary voluntary responses through voting based on the verdicts of a subset of members without a rigorous process or by assuming voter has equally relevant expertise and experience. For example, if the question or idea is ambiguous then relying on just the votes of those who turn out may on occasions be no better than a roll of the dice.
For Grupthink to be really useful need to find a way to step the feedback through a rigorous mandatory scoring process that addresses all of the above. Until then I certainly wouldn't use it as a tool to set any priorities let alone that of it's own development.
It's not always wise to follow a crowd, and if there's more than one crowd heading in different directions then the difference of opinion needs some assessment which if any should you be guided by? The one with the most votes might represent the worst risk!
Is that any help?