The Carrot Project

Yeah, big usability problem we need to figure out. The settings on the right side of your subs page just set email notifications on/off for the three types of subscriptions, which are currently “new comment”, “new item in a product category”, and “new feedback”. (Whether those email boxes are checked or not, you’ll still get all your subscriptions via your RSS feed and in the Messages tab). But the “new feedback” setting is confusing because there’s only one subscription it applies to; it isn’t relevant unless you’re actually subscribed to new feedback, which you do via the star at the top of the Recent Feedback list (which itself is too hard to get to).

First solution is probably to only display the email-delivery settings for types of feedback you’re actually subscribed to, so they don’t confuse people otherwise. Have to think some more about other fixes. Ideas welcome.

Wow. The star is cool (and easy to use), but I had no idea that you could click on it to subscribe to stuff.

Yeah. Definitely need some way to draw that to people’s attention…

I think we might want to consider bringing a link to the main page of the feedback forum to the front page of the site. Maybe on the Welcome Beta Community slide. Good discussions happening in here. Good to encourage people to get in on them.

That doesn’t solve the making the subscribe to new feedback function more prominent problem, however.

Maybe when people click that link to the feedback forum from the front page, we drop a little orange bar at the top of the page asking if they want to subscribe to new feedback (and maybe explaining to people that they can look out for stars everywhere and click them to subscribe?

Not the most elegant solution…

“I think we might want to consider bringing a link to the main page of the feedback forum to the front page of the site. ”

I think that would be good. There’s something counterintuitive about having to click on “leave feedback” and then click on “feedback” to get to the feedback forum page.

“That doesn’t solve the making the subscribe to new feedback function more prominent problem, however.”

I think there are actually two problems:

1. “Subscribe by clicking on star” is not immediately noticeable, and is probably not intuitive to the average user.

2. The email subscription type “new feedback” doesn’t work unless you have subscribed to the new feedback thread by clicking on the star. So, I can check “new feedback” on the subscriptions tab and still not be subscribed, which feels weird.

I think you’re absolutely right, and we’ll be discussing this tomorrow and figuring out where it sits on the priorities list.

Out of curiosity where do we stand on these issues today? Have we addressed them all? To what degree of success?

We now link to the feedback forum from the front page, and we show an explanatory popup bubble the first time you see the subscription star. Those are good steps. The one idea in this thread that I still think might be worth doing is to only show the email on/off settings for subscription types that are actually relevant to your current subscriptions.

The downside of that would be that if you really don’t want to get anything by email, you couldn’t just go to your subscription settings, uncheck all the boxes, and be guaranteed that you’d prevented notification emails entirely. Because you might not be seeing all the boxes.

What do you think Jake, should we write a story about this and stick it way down somewhere at the bottom of the list so we don’t forget it?