give us your feedback!

It's been a pretty cool inaugural week for our team blog. I've seen lots of links to our blog from all over the place. It's awesome to know that you guys are interested in what we have to say.

I've noticed that we've gotten a lot of feedback about our products (current and past). There's a lot for us to say about this kind of thing, and you'll see it in the upcoming weeks as this blog continues to take shape. I've got a couple of posts brewing in the back of my mind as a result of some of the comments that I've seen here.

It would be immensely helpful to us if you also submitted your ideas for new products, feature requests, and everything else like that to our product feedback website. That way, we can aggregate these requests all together and use that data to help us make our decisions about what features we should add, whether we should port a product from WinOffice, and so much more. The data is very important to us.

Someone actually does read all of the feedback that we get there. Actually, several someones do. I'm one of them. As a user experience researcher, I go through that product feedback to see if there are comments in there about the user experience.

Your feedback helps me to guide the various application teams through providing the best user experience possible. Tell us what you like about our products. Tell us what you don't like. Tell us how you use our products in cool ways. Tell us what you wish we'd do (even if it involves a long walk and a short pier).

For example, we get a lot of feedback about Remote Desktop Connection. One of the pieces of feedback that we get about RDC the most often is a complaint from users that they can't resize their window. Technically, this isn't correct; it's just that we buried the option in a place that you can't find it. (For a more thorough discussion about some of the feedback that we've gotten about RDC, including instructions for how to resize your window, check out my post over in go ahead, mac my day (my own blog) titled discoverability). When we started talking about making the next version of RDC, fixing this issue was one of my main UX goals. After all, it doesn't do us any good to make functionality available to you if you can't find it. When we release the next version of RDC, you can tell me whether I was successful.

This isn't to say that you shouldn't comment here! Comments spur discussion, both with us and with other people who read this blog. I just want to make sure that requests like 'give me Visio!' get counted properly, so that we can make the right decisions based on the best data available.