Seesmic (note that Michael Arrington is an investor) CEO Loic Le Meur asked readers what they would do if they were the CEO of the company to encourage daily use by users. Responses flooded in via Seesmic videos, blog comments, Twitter and Friendfeed, and ranged from derisive quips to multi-paragraph business plans. But for the most part they were surprisingly informative.
We have gone through and categorized the comments into broader buckets to get a better understanding of what users want out of Seesmic. The results are graphed in the image above and discussed below, but what’s more interesting is simply using this approach to make sense of all the feedback. Some of the suggestions are quite good near the head, and the community always likes to know they’re being listened to.
Far and away the most popular suggestion involved mobile integration. Users want video functionality on their mobile devices, whether it be web-based or in the form of a Seesmic app. This comes as no surprise with the release of the iPhone and the dozens of new apps, but the potential of mobile video could be revolutionary. Live video chat on your mobile phone, for instance, could revolutionize the way we communicate.
Next were requests to improve community features. The prevailing theme throughout these had to do with increasing privacy settings and making Seesmic less “chaotic” in general. Specifically, users want to confine their interactions within a group of people they care about, whether it be their family and friends or those with similar interests and beliefs. If implemented well, this could generate the community experience Le Meur is looking for, and even make the service attractive to advertisers.
Some more interesting suggestions included speech-to-text functionality, a potentially huge step in indexing videos and improving search results, and extension of the service into education, business, and social networking platforms. On the technical side, users want Seesmic to ditch Flash as their primary development language, the ability to embed videos in emails, and more ubiquitous browser compatibility.
If you’re interested, Loic, here’s our advice: ditch the Flash interface and fast. And let users add more text metadata to videos (tags and links in particular).
Smart CEO… asking the customer what they want to improve a system is usually a win-win situation and also a fantastic way to build user loyalty!
Jon
http://woodmarvels.com – Create Unique Memories
All you have to do is ask … well, then sort and manage and prioritize and plan and implement after the flood of feedback comes in.
But ask, and ye shall receive from consumers. (one of the Open Innovation commandments for business)
Good job. Asking your users is the way to go. That’s why we take the phased approach with SmibsNet and Doorbell. We learn from our current users, improve and then let the next batch in. That way we don’t hear the same complaints over and over and new users have a better experience.
Henry Ford: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”
BusinessWeek: “Customers don’t envision the future, they inform the present”
Why the Flash hate?
Steve Jobs: “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
I thought they already got rid of the flash interface. The last time I’ve been there I got a html-flash mixed that was soooo much better than the flash-only version!!
Feedback is good and important but I agree with the quotes from 4 & 6. In my experience people are good at suggesting things to perfect the current application/software but bad at suggesting things that will bring in more users or taking it to the next level.
That’s hilarious that they had to wade through a whole lot of videos to get user feedback and then type up summaries of each so they could keep it all organized. Or did they make a spreadsheet where each cell was a video? The written word exists for a reason and there are some tasks to which it is better suited than a talking head.
Anyhow, I’ve never used seesmic but I can only assume people are complaining about menus and navigation etc. being in flash and not the video player. Or are people itching for Real, Windows media player, QuickTime or Java???
Loic is a really nice guy, but come on. The site’s numbers are so low (0.00026%) http://www.alex...ils/seesmic.com makes you wonder what the numbers would be if Techcrunch didn’t push it every other week?
sometimes i just can’t bear the stupidity of so-called “journalists”. seriously.
1) “Live video chat on your mobile phone, for instance, could revolutionize the way we communicate.”
Really? isn’t that what MSN messenger, Yahoo and Skype are already offering? how is that new? get a wifi connection and start video chating tomorrow on your iphone already. how is seesmic innovating here?
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2) ditching flash? bunch of stupid conservative asses. fyi, now flash allows deep-linking. you know what that means??? yes, SEO, social networks with direct links towards profiles etc… you name it. thus cut the bullshit with ajax. ajax is a nightmare when it comes to cross browser compatibility. lot of bugs in both FF and Opera. Take a website like Jogli for instance. Their website doesn’t even work in Opera because of ajax issues, while opera is so popular in europe and there 45 million cellphone users with opera-mini installed. so cut the crap already, FLASH is the best platform today, because it is 100% cross-browser compatible and now allows deep-linking.
@arrington – get in touch with me if you need the mobile app ported to 700+ mobile devices. we’ll help you get to market quickly. take a look at http://www.theportinglab.com
I think its comedy to call the people that make this shit “visionary”. If they have a viable business then great, I give them props.
Visionary? What about Seesmic is truly visionary?
I think Loic is doing all the right things, I’m an active Seesmic user and really enjoy watching and learning from how Loic transparently runs his company.
Fluff piece… you guys are constantly pushing seesmic now.
In my experience, most Flash haters are HTML Developers who fear for their jobs. They are a small but vocal group. They may have tried to learn ActionScript – but couldn’t quite get their heads around a real programming language.
They desperately cling to the past with long-ago debunked claims that Flash is not SEO friendly, etc.
The author of this piece says “ditch the Flash interface and fast”.
Why?
Free movie passes and marketing for Seesmic. That’s all TechCrunch is these days. It’s like you’re not even trying to be objective and cover interesting tech issues anymore. I guess that’s you’re prerogative, but seems like you’re opening the door for other players. You’re certainly getting less of my time from now on.