Help Us Help You

The Zipingo Web site will launch a new "look and feel" pretty soon. I've been working with team members on revamping the design and functionality of the Help area. Soon afterwards, I'll tackle the Forums and this Blog.

Anyway, I'm excited about the Help Area "reveal" which is planned for early June. While working with team members Tonya (on UE and design elements) and Izzy (on infrastructure and testing), I've been documenting and tracking all the Help Area revisions on an internal Wiki. You can get an idea of what that looks like by clicking on the Wiki page image in this blog post.

I just upload screen shots or mock-ups to the Zipingo Team Wiki plus my notes about each section of each page. So far so good. Any team member can see our progress at any point, provided I've updated the Wiki regularly. Anyone who has comments to share can add notes to the discussion area for that Wiki page, send me an email or an IM. Not everyone is comfortable with editing Wikis yet, so team members don't have to give me feedback on the discussion page. My attitude is, even though we're all using the Wiki, you should never try to force folks to communicate with you through just one channel.

If you've never worked with a Wiki, you should try it. Just playing around with one of the public Wikis will get you hooked. I'm a big fan of sites like Wikipedia. My daughter tells me it's become the most cited source in research papers at her high school.

We use dozens of Wikis inside Intuit. There are Wikis for sharing market research, Wikis for sharing best practices, Wikis for documenting processes, and so on. Using a centralized and truly collaborative tool like a Wiki has been really helpful since I started at Intuit last year. I'm a monster early adopter, so anything that has to do with user-generated content, user collaboration, or Web 2.0 social media gets my immediate attention. So I was very glad to find out that Intuit, like many enterprises, empowers its employees to use these tools, and they trust us to make the right decisions when we do. Hey, a bit of trivia here. Did you know that political candidates manage Wikis these days? Yeah, they do. That's how valuable collaborative workspaces have become.

But back to the Help Area. In redesigning the pages, we took the the most useful ideas from other Intuit Web-based Help areas for Quicken, Quicken Rental Property Manager and Quicken Medical Expense Manager. The Help pages for these Intuit products have all been evolving at a steady pace in order to meet the needs of their different users, so it just made sense to start here. Zipingo is a different animal, so the redesign isn't an exact clone of any of these sites. We put our own spin on it, which included a few style tweaks and other things, with many of these changes based the Zipingo user feedback we've received since we launched last fall.

So stay tuned. You'll see a change fairly soon. I promise. Meanwhile, I'm always open to suggestions, so if you see something you like or don't like in any of my three areas (Help & Support, Community Forums, or the Blog), or you just have a general comment, feel free to let me know...by whatever method is convenient for you. I'm listening. Unless, of course, it's by carrier pigeon. I'm not into pigeons, so if you send me any feedback by pigeon, you're on your own.

~ Zipingo Kim

Comments

[Susan]

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Susan

http://www.car-insurance-choices.com

[David]

I like the idea of Zipingo.com. I have seen you on my personal quicken software a few times and have finally looked you up. I think my customers should give us an honest feedback, and I would not mind that posted on the Internet. I would say only 2-5% of our customers are not the type of customers we want to begin with, so I would not ask them to write a review! However, I really believe most people love what we do. I am going to market my customers to Rate Us! If it works, can I get a current rating chart on my website?