A friend brought my attention to this article this morning – Frito-Lay Trashes SunChips Bag After Biodegradable Packaging Criticized For Being Too Noisy. Quick summary – Company brings out new biodegradable packaging, customers think it’s too noisy and start making noise on social networks, company caves and reverts to old-bad-for-the-environment packaging.
Now, I’m a big proponent of listening to your community and feeding its responses back into product development. But here’s the catch. This process only works when you, the company or product manager, are willing and ready to say “NO”. Which is what I think Frito-Lay should’ve done in this case. I’ve thought about it, and it’s what my response to the outcry would have been.
I should explain myself. Listening to your community is a great way to get insight into how they use your product, what they want from it, what would make the product ‘something-they-use’ to ‘something-they-can’t-imagine-life-without’. It’s a way to be there for and give back to them and have them come back to you.
That’s what I see as an organisation’s responsibility to their community. But it also has a responsibility to its product (and by extension its stakeholders).
First thing to recognise about community feedback is that it isn’t necessarily the majority viewpoint. In my experience, a majority viewpoint usually consists of the majority of ‘noisy’ members in a community. (Note: I use ‘noisy’ as a term of endearment.)
Second thing to recognise about community feedback is that it can be wrong. It can be wrong for the product, it can be wrong for the company’s strategy, it can be wrong for the greater good.
And so it’s okay to say no to your community. “No” doesn’t have to be a confrontation. Do your research, get a handle on how big an issue it is for what percentage of your customers. Use that when you explain your decision and how you came to it. State in no uncertain terms why one path is better than the other. (In this case, Frito-Lay have a trump card – “We’re saving the planet!!” Tell me that won’t guilt the most noise-sensitive person into agreement ;P) Suggest alternatives to make a transition smoother. (Use a bowl for your chips?)
Above all, be human. Allow your community to connect with you on that level.
I’ve been a Flickr user since 2007, and in that time, I have uploaded about 4000 photos. I upload my images to Flickr for two big reasons – As a backup to my many backups, in case the unthinkable happens, but mainly as a way to share my experiences with my people.
The more I use Flickr though, the more limited I think it is. From Flickr’s About page, they list two goals – Sharing and Organising.
Let’s start with sharing. What I think works well on Flickr is uploading photos and distributing it to all my different channels. So anything I put up is sent to Facebook, Twitter (via Friendfeed), Google Buzz and my blog. (Well, that’s broken right now, due to the move to wordpress.org, but you get the point.) People from all my different networks are able to catch up with my uploads if they so choose. This is the main reason I don’t put my photos on Facebook. They would be constrained to just that network.
Once it gets to this point however, I feel that the continuing process becomes too restricted. A non-Flickr member who clicks through to my photostream can only view the image, check out Exif data and click through to other items in my photostream. If they want to make a comment, they’d have to sign up to the service. I can understand not allowing anonymous comments, as a Flickr user I wouldn’t want that, but asking someone to sign up to the WHOLE service just to leave a comment is a bit much isn’t it?
Why not add a blog-like comment form where non-members could leave identifiable comments on an image using a name and e-mail address, or using a 3rd party log in like Twitter or Google? My instinct is that some of my friends would be more amenable to sign up to Flickr once they’ve had some engaging interaction with it.
On to organising. The more I use Flickr, the more painful organising gets. I’m not sure if it’s because of volume, or that it took me a while to figure sets, collections and tagging out, but I keep finding myself wishing for a better deal. First off, I really really need a level higher than Collections. I find that I have a few Collections I’d like to link up, and there’s just no way of doing that.
Flickr lets you locate your photos on a map. Anyone who has used that probably know *just how painful* the process is. I guess it works better if your camera has geotagging, and maybe that’s what that feature is for specifically. Otherwise, it’s just too hard.
And finally, editing tags. Ever mistakenly added a tag to a set of images which is inaccurate, and tried to take the tag away? If there is a way to do that en masse, I haven’t found it. One has to go through each picture, page by page, click on the little ‘x’ and then confirm the deletion. Not fun.
And now for the big one – viewing images. Flickr recently had a major release where they tweaked their UI, made the default image size bigger and added ‘lightbox’ browsing. I really like browsing images in lightbox view, without the clutter of the single image pages. However, the image description is missing from the lightbox view, and is hidden on the single page view if the image is in a horizontal orientation.
I find that this really takes away from the browsing experience. People are telling a story through their pictures. Titles and descriptions are part of the story-telling. Not making these visible as we browse photos definitely takes away from the overall experience. The main experience on Flickr in my opinion…
