Tuesday, July 14, 2009 12:12 AM
I installed the preview release of Office 2010 tonight. Just started playing through it, so I don’t have anything crazy whiz bang to report. However, for those of you doing an Office beta for the first time I wanted to share something I found in how we can submit feedback.
This is nothing new. Apparently it was part of the Office 2007 beta and feedback program also. But for those of us that are unaware, hopefully this is insightful.
After I installed Office, I noticed an interesting little application under the Office Tools menu:
Send a Smile? Is this some sort of emoticon-based application that provides a new way to express your current emotional state with tiny yellow faces?
Actually, no. Send a Smile is a feedback mechanism for Office. When you run it, you’ll notice two little icons will become available in your system tray.
While you’re working with Office 2010, you may come across a feature that you really like, and you want to let Microsoft know that you really like it (yay, good, awesome, keep this!). What you do is click the little happy face icon and you’ll be greeted with this interface:
This will send your comments and a screenshot back to Microsoft. Keep in mind this isn’t necessarily a bug-reporting mechanism…its a tool to report on the features of the product: what it does well, what’s kewl, what’s missing, and what’s bad. Since Microsoft wants to hear both sides, that’s where the frowny face icon comes into play.
So for instance, you’ll understand my surprise when I discovered that, beyond *any* conventional wisdom, Microsoft has decided to bring along a new version of Access in the suite…
Actual splash screen for the application…no really…not doctored at all.
When you see something that you don’t like, click the frowny icon to get an identical interface with some changes in the wording…
And yes, I did actually submit this.
Not only is this a great little tool for providing feedback, but its an interesting model for developers to consider for soliciting feedback from end users of their products.
Happy feature submitting!
D