Get Satisfaction – Development in Jeans and a T-Shirt

A few little things.

Nick Jackson / October 8, 2010 / Get Satisfaction, Open Data, Service 2.0

Recently we’ve been lining up a few cool things which I want to share. Not massive things, no new services with bells and whistles, not even a shiny new design to look at. No, today’s changes are all about little things which most of people won’t notice, but which makes everyone’s lives a bit easier.

First of all, we’re beginning to push our Get Satisfaction feedback tabs onto more services. These delightful little tabs come in a variety of colours (depending on the service you’re using), but all live on the left hand side of the page and give you a pop-up feedback window from where you can tell us your questions, ideas, problems or praise. The whole thing is smoothly integrated with your University account so there’s no need to register again, and we really do value (and listen to, and reply to) everything we hear. Give it a click if you want to tell us something.

Secondly, we’re acting on some feedback! A few of you (read: a lot of you) have complained about the weird sign in page for our Wi-Fi network which forced you to click the ‘I Accept’ button instead of just hitting enter. You’ll be pleased to hear that we’re changing that, and you should see the results either today or tomorrow.

Continue reading “A few little things.”

On A Get Satisfaction Roll

Nick Jackson / November 20, 2009November 20, 2009 / Get Satisfaction

Building on some earlier work (but in a more official capacity this time) I think I should share some of the artwork I want to scatter around the University to help advertise Get Satisfaction. So, here goes.

As always, feedback is welcome.

The Get Satisfaction Crash Course

Nick Jackson / November 4, 2009 / Get Satisfaction, Service 2.0

Get Satisfaction is getting its first public airing on a mass distribution tomorrow morning when the student email goes out. In preparation, I’ve knocked up this crash course on how to post topics, reply, get signed up and tweak your preferences and personalisation.

This particular version is aimed at students (although should provide a good grounding for staff wanting to get involved), a more in-depth staff-friendly one will be along in a day or so with more detail on things like moderation.

What people talk about…

Nick Jackson / November 2, 2009 / Get Satisfaction, Service 2.0

Now that the University has some Get Satisfaction support goodness going on, there are all kinds of cool widgets we can use to integrate the support community with other websites. The Blogs help page sports a “Feedback” tab on the left hand side of the window, powered by Get Satisfaction. My other blog has a page explaining about what I do as a Student Rep, and includes a feedback widget right in the middle of the page. In fact it’s so easy to do that here’s an example of our most recent active topics, embedded into the middle of a blog post.

Hang on a second, communicating with the mothership…

Clever, huh? If you’ve got a site which is relevant to the University and you’re wanting to get hold of a widget to expand your direct support methods then just let me know!

What, Why and How

Nick Jackson / November 2, 2009November 2, 2009 / Get Satisfaction, Service 2.0

Sadly, my efforts to make wtf.lincoln.ac.uk the official address for our Get Satisfaction account weren’t successful, despite receiving widespread support. We are, however, now sporting a brand new and shiny URL at http://wwh.lincoln.ac.uk. The WWH stands for What, Why and How which neatly encompasses a lot of the things which Get Satisfaction will be dealing with. Other suggestions included huh.lincoln.ac.uk (as in “Huh? What?”) and a variety of “eh” and “umm” derivatives.

However, we also have some good news in that we now completely support Get Satisfaction! We can properly moderate conversation to keep it relevant, make sure the Student Reps get recognised, keep people up to date easier and more! Expect to see more news about this through some more channels soon, but if you want to tell anybody to use Get Satisfaction (or What, Why, How) then please feel free.

GSFN, PFMPC, LUNA and other acronyms.

Nick Jackson / October 30, 2009 / Get Satisfaction, LUNA, Print From My PC, Service 2.0

Okay, it’s been a while, so here’s a roundup of what’s going on in the land of Nick.

Get Satisfaction

My never-ending quest to get the University using Get Satisfaction seems to be nearing an end with the news that we will very soon (Monday!) be getting on the basic level of subscription services. This brings all kinds of cool new stuff to the service, including more moderation tools (so we can keep the conversation relevant and better manage how we respond to things), the ability to flag student reps as awesome (so more people listen to them), extra branding opportunities (so you know it’s about Lincoln), more widgets (for letting people use Get Satisfaction from within other sites) and most importantly the support of the University!

Now all we need is a cool name. So far thoughts include feedback.lincoln.ac.uk, thoughts.lincoln.ac.uk, qipp.lincoln.ac.uk, comments.lincoln.ac.uk and my personal favourite (although highly unlikely) wtf.lincoln.ac.uk – anybody got any more ideas or preferences? Let me know.

Print From My PC

Our ‘wireless printing’ service is still on track for a week 6 soft launch, although we’re experiencing some interesting glitches with printing from Ubuntu and other Linux flavours since they don’t trust our certificate provider. Kirsty took a brief wander around the library to work out where we could put posters advertising the service and you should hopefully see them appearing soon (so that you can break things and complain at us).

Lincoln University Network Access

This is a new one – LUNA is the name for an updated network access controller which will be rolling out to Student Village after the Christmas break. It includes improved security, better guidance on what to do when things go wrong, and (best of all) redesigned pages so you still feel like you’re within the University. Guess who’s been tasked with dismantling the existing pages, figuring out how they work and redesigning them all? Yup, it’s me!

All in all it’s a load of exciting things going on here in ICT. Hopefully once Get Satisfaction is working I can get cracking on another Service 2.0 thing (I want to see if there’s something I can do with the helpdesk…), there are some big enhancements to timetabling floating around in the cloud, and there’s a huge (and I mean huge) set of changes to student communications in the pipeline.

The SU are Getting Satisfied!

Nick Jackson / October 14, 2009October 19, 2009 / Get Satisfaction, Service 2.0

The SU plugged Get Satisfaction today at the Student Reps training session!

My student side declares a victory (“Hooray! Advocacy as a Student Rep worked!”) but my staff side now goes “umm… now what?”. See, at the moment it’s impossible to moderate discussions, or to change the state of a topic without posting a reply. This means that if someone answers a question who isn’t a staff member there’s no way to say “this has been answered” without also weighing in and adding unnecessary crud to the thread.

$99 a month for moderation tools… which it’s impossible to justify without a detailed survey and explanation of how it works. Which is impossible to generate without users. Which are difficult (but not impossible) to get without promotion. Which the University won’t approve without some form of moderation tools and staff training in place.

Hmm. Anybody got experience with this kind of ‘just trust me on this one’ promotion? Get Satisfaction is so unique that there’s nothing in the market to compare to, and so new that there aren’t any big case studies. Nor does it help that there are only a scant handful of educational institutions who only half use the service.

Either way I’ve switched the default login method from Get Satisfaction’s own user database to Facebook (although the former is still available) to make it more immediately accessible. We really could do with getting SSO working; but that’s another story and more money.

Blogging my way through ICT.

Nick Jackson / September 2, 2009 / This Blog

Hello everybody, it’s Nick here with yet another blog. You may have come over here from my student blog, where I’ve spent most of the summer rambling about how I think bits of the University may be tweaked. Well, I’m now working for the lovely people in the ICT department and looking at the feasibility of implementing those tweaks!

I’m kicking off my first ‘proper job’ by looking at Get Satisfaction (read up on my other blog) and IP printing (or; being able to use the MFPs in the University from anywhere). This blog will be a repository of how everything is going and what sort of cool, new and exciting things I’m in the process of prodding until they break.