Satisfactory Support
One of the things I’m doing as far as support goes for Today is using a new Web service called Get Satisfaction to handle support. Satisfaction is somewhat like a forum system, but with an interface more designed towards support and feature requests rather than just soapboxing your opinion on something.
I actually was inspired by Buzz Andersen’s use of it as his primary method of support, but also had my own ideas behind it.
- If there is ever a case where I’m out of town or just too overwhelmed to look at the support queue for a day or two, having a community of Today fans on Satisfaction makes it easy for them to answer someone’s question if need be.
- Satisfaction has a great feature that let’s people rank their favorite ideas. If you see someone has posted about a feature you’re interested in already, you can just click a button to say you like the idea as well. It made it blatantly obvious that I need to implement calendar filtering in Today asap!
- I think people are a lot nicer if they know others are going to be reading their message. I’ve only had one snarky post out of almost 100 thus far, and the crowd chastised him for it.
For single-person shops like mine, services like Satisfaction help ease the burden of wearing all the hats. Now if only they could find a way to eliminate support requests entirely.
Here’s a few other Mac developers that are taking advantage of the service
- Buzz Andersen (PodWorks, Cocoalicious)
- Todd Ditchendorf (Fluid)
- Gus Mueller (VoodooPad, Acorn)
- Fraser Speirs (FlickrExport)