A suggestion for the Suggestion Button
: I wish every application I use had a suggetion button.
While I’m using a program I come up with ideas for things I like and I’d be willing and eager to send them to the program’s creators just in case I have a good idea or I add to a groundswell of consumer desire. If a few of those things actually get added to my favorite programs, then it’s worth the investment.
Now that we’re all connected all the time, it would be nothing to add a simple Suggestion Button to any program that sends the idea into HQ. A smart company would send a nice response. A really smart company would offer rewards for the best ideas or ideas actually added. A brilliant company would link these ideas straight into a forum where others could comment on, add to, and improve them.
Hell, Microsoft has my computer send in error reports every time a program crashes. Photoshop insists on updating my program almost every time I start it. It’s no big to also send in constructive suggestions.
I’m never going to remember all these wishes and ideas — because I’m in the middle of using these programs to do what I need to do — and I’m certainly never going to bother looking up an email for a company and sending in a suggestion; I have a life. And even when I was a beta user of TypePad, I found it a royal pain to try to find the forum and add a post with a suggestion.
Instead, if I could just click one button atop the application and type a few words into a box and click “send,” I’d contribute my little bit of consumer/user wisdom to the collective whole.
Just now, for example, I was using FeedDemon and wishing it had a “back” button. I wish we could all lobby Microsoft to add RSS to IE (Scoble says Microsoft wants to hear from us, but how?).
Now in this blog world, Anil and Nick and Scoble, smart folks connected to the companies I just mentioned, will probably see this in their referrer logs and add it to their own suggestion lists. And that’s good for some things; who hasn’t been impressed with SixApart’s response to blogged suggestions? But that’s not a terribly efficient way to do things.
So let’s create a new standard in software starting right here in blogs:
The Suggestion Button.
