Community Feedback Meeting- Join Us! March 23

Our next community meeting is Tuesday March 23 at 7pm pacific time. For those who missed it: please join us next time.

Regular community feedback meetings are the centerpiece of Qworky’s engineering process.  As software developers, we tend to have a different view of the software we’re working on than the people who use our products, so it’s great to get usage and feedback from ‘outside the bubble’.  It’s also a valuable opportunity to find bugs and calibrate just how well we’re doing.

image via Flickr baratunde

Jon and I organized the last community meeting. Including Jon and I, there were nine total attendees.  For Sam, Jacqui, and Micah, it was their first meeting using our platform; Shireen and Cathy had seen an earlier version of the software; and Denzil and Mikal are part of the Qworky team.  One of our biggest goals for the last engineering sprint was to improve the connection reliability; judging from people’s experience we’ve made substantial progress.

Excerpts from our Last Community Meeting

The discussion at the meeting flowed freely — the transcript gives an idea of what we covered.  Some of the highlights:

• Shireen (aka @digitalsista) and many others were quick to point out that the user names were too small to read.  This is the kind of feedback that is easy to respond to and we had already fixed it by the time our next big meeting rolled around two days later.  Jacqui suggested going even further: “there should probably be an option for different sized fonts or font choices for people who cannot see very well.”
• Sam suggested notifications for when organizers or participants logged on and not just having to type “I’m here.” to announce their online status.
• Cathy (@CathyWebSavvyPR) and others expressed an interest in seeing comments marked “action” appear under the Action Items tab to the left of the screen.  Everyone will be happy to know that this little bug was noted and fixed, so now all the comments marked as actions show up under the Action Items tab!
• Micah and Sam helped identify bugs with how the page looked on different browsers.

All in all, it was a great meeting with lots of great feedback for us to use and improve upon.   Thanks once again to everybody for participating!

Community Topic: Focus on Fundamentals

Our next community feedback meeting, “Focus on Fundamentals: Performance, Security, and Information”, is on Tuesday, March 23, at 7 p.m.   As well as testing out our preview version, we’d also like to get the community’s input on some of the key questions the QX and engineering teams are wrestling with.  For example:

• We believe that the page for a meeting needs to load quickly and that chat needs to be as responsive as your favorite instant messenger.  What other aspects of performance matter to you?
• We believe that people will need to feel good about Qworky’s commitment to security and privacy before trusting us with their information.  Who else do you trust with your online information and why?  What core elements are necessary for trust? What is your expectation of privacy and/or security with meeting software? As a meeting organizer? As a participant?
• We believe it’s valuable to have the most relevant meeting information available to you at your finger tips.  Thinking about your last team meeting, or important meeting, what was the most important information for you to have available?

For those who were there last time, these are just the starting points … the discussion is likely to flow in different directions and it should be a good time with interesting people.

Our Next Community Meeting Tomorrow March 22nd