Get Satisfaction is an awesome site devoted to providing a platform for companies, as well as the people who use their products, to provide (and share) support for their products. It’s a top notch approach to customer service that does a great job at leveraging current technology as well as current social community behavioral trends to build an ecosystem of support that builds upon itself.
Apart from just being a really crisply designed site overall, they do a few things exceptionally well. The one I wanted to call out here was the way they address what is plaguing a lot of us these days - social network fatigue and the cold start problem. They’ve found a very elegant way to allow their new users to use a social profile they might already have to serve as the foundation of their Get Satisfaction profile.
For more on the company, here’s a snippet from their About section. I highly recommend you check them out next time how find yourself in need of help with a product, or better yet, if you’re particularly passionate about something that others might need help with.
Get Satisfaction is a direct connection between people and companies that fosters problem-solving, promotes sharing, and builds up relationships. Thousands of companies use this neutral space to support customers, exchange ideas, and get feedback about their products and services. Get Satisfaction is open, transparent, and free. You’re free to ask, free to answer, and free to start a new conversation. Everyone is invited and encouraged to participate: companies, employees, customers — anyone with an opinion, an answer, or something to say.
I think this is the kind of on-boarding OpenID had in mind, but their sign-in flow is so convoluted that it’s virtually unusable.
Toluu is using a similar approach to the cold-start dilemma. Definitely very convenient, although I didn’t have an invite and couldn’t follow the process through to the end.
[...] the rest of this great post here Author: Time: Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 10:00 am Category: Satisfaction Comments: You [...]
I just got my Toluu invite so if I get any I’ll send one your way, Tom.
Thanks for the kind words, and thanks to others for the critical voices. Whitney, we would love to hear your opinions about how to improve our sign-on process. Please join us if you have the time: http://getsatisfaction.com/satisfaction.
[...] Despite my obvious lack of enthusiasm for the subject matter, I think this is a great case study for heavily content-focused sites that need to attract and retain readership. I’ll definitely be referring to it in the future when discussing “onboarding” functionality. Read another cool example of onboarding at Alex Rainert’s Everyday UX. [...]