You may have seen this new feature on our Web site already, but we just rolled out the LabVIEW Idea Exchange where you can suggest ideas for us to implement in LabVIEW and, more importantly, you and your fellow LabVIEW users can vote on the ideas that you think are most worthy. We’ve tried suggestion boxes in the past, but this more public approach where we not only get new ideas but also get a better notion of the priority based on the collective wisdom of the crowd has a much better chance of driving impact.
A little background – our LabVIEW R&D managers are also excited about this feature on our Web site as well. With the breadth and complexity of the LabVIEW platform, we struggle at times making tradeoffs about feature development. With tools like Idea Exchange, we aren’t necessarily looking for MORE ideas, but we see it as a much better process to prioritize and improve our hit ratio for new feature development. At certain times in the development cycle, we hope to populate the Idea Exchange with our list of features planned for development in an effort to make some late-in-the-game adjustments as we go. We will also try to comment on the ideas coming from the community periodically to give our position on them.
So bring on your ideas, but be prepared for your cohorts in the LabVIEW user community to weigh in with their own opinions.
June 2, 2009 at 7:23 pm |
Oh, yes. As you can see, the exchange has already had quite a few posts in the two days it’s been active.
Even if NI does not respond to posts there, this has two major advantages over the product suggestion center:
1. People can track the suggestions they made.
2. People can see the suggestions other people made.
Incidentally, I think the implementation of the exchange is lacking (to put it mildly). Some examples:
1. It’s not that easy to track your posts (although a custom search would probably do it).
2. It’s not that easy to see a listing of the suggestions. This would lead to duplicate suggestions.
3. It’s not that easy to track all the comments posted to the exchange, thereby making it harder to have discussions.
I’m guessing more issues will more clearly pop up as we gain some experience with this.
I’ve told some of these points to Laura Feeney, but NI would probably need to put some pressure on Lithium or put some manpower on it to resolve this issue.