Send A Smile

Send a Smile is an interesting way Microsoft are using to elicit feedback on the new Beta of Office 2007. In Jensen Harris blog he describes why Microsoft are doing this.
"Send a Smile is the best way to send feedback about Office 2007. Believe it or not, your feedback goes directly to us on the product team—directly to the people responsible for making decisions about the product in every area."

According to MSBlog Send a Smile works like this "Simply when you’re using an Office Beta 2 application and your happy with a feature or think “oooh I didn’t know I could do this before” and you’re having a good experience, double click the green smile to send a quick note to the Office team along with an optional screenshot of what your screen sees, and send away. It even saves it as a JPG so that it uses up little bandwidth"

As a Product Manager I am always interested in getting feedback on what frustrates our users and what our users really like about it. We often deal with system support, "super users", and managers but I really feel we don't always get the chance to get enough feedback from the day to day users of the system. What I like about this idea is that it captures your feeling at its source, when you are totally frustrated that you can't work out to do next or you think of something that would save you time hit the appropriate face and send it to the people making the decisions on the product.

I'll be talking the team on Tuesday morning to see if this is something we can do with our upcoming beta releases. We try to schedule research time for Friday afternoons perhaps I can persuade someone to see if this is something we can do.