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Rob Hudson
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Leveraging the Infragistics developer community
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Infragistics Team,

I have been using Infragistics tools for most of a decade, and have been supporting my developer peers in the Infragistics forums for nearly that long. I would really appreciate you giving this proposal some serious thought. I have taken a lot of time to think this through and document it for you, and I hope you will afford this suggestion appropriate consideration.

I have been chewing on an idea for a long time that would be an enhancement to the Infragistics documentation and support website. 

You really need a community-driven code samples area, preferably cross-linked into the documentation.

You have made some efforts at code samples in the past... And they have been pretty good. Your staff content authors are brilliant.  Tony, Craig, and Murtaza are amazing, and I love reading their stuff. The problem with each effort has had to do with goal and structure, not content. Here is a summary.

  • The Code Samples on the support website are great... and the content is superb...
    • but do you realize the last code sample posted to your Code Samples area of the ASP.Net support site was nearly two-and-a-half years ago? Yup, February 2009. http://community.infragistics.com/aspnet/codesamples/default.aspx.
    • Plus, the samples are not categorized in any way to make it easy to find something specific.
    • Lastly, all of the effort for maintaining this site falls on your internal staff. You have a broad user community that has some pretty good talent that can contribute to something like this.
  • The Samples Browser is also great, and *sometimes* helps, but...
    • it doesn't go very deep.
    • It is designed as a sales tool for people unfamiliar with the tools to get a broad overview of the capabilities.  As such, it often is not helpful for people really trying to get into the nitty gritty.
  • The Documentation is tremendous as a reference tool... if what you need is a reference tool.
    • However, there is a real deficit in the "how to" aspect of the documentation. For an example, have a look at the CSOM section of the ASP.Net documentation.
      • If you are trying to learn Russian, you don't start off reading the Russian dictionary.
    • Having community-driven code samples linked into the documentation would help tremendously.
  • You do have control-specific forums... and they are great for support.
    • But to actually use them to try to find out how to do something useful is hard.
    • You have to wade through a ton of bug reports and posts that have no real permanent contribution.
    • Instead of finding the solution you are looking for, you often find yourself in the middle of a conversation you have to decipher.
    • You often have to read through numerous such conversations before you find something resembling an answer... or worse yet, discover that there is no answer in the forums, and the time was wasted.
    • Some of your best staff are writing code samples and placing them in the forums.  Hat tip to Duane Hoyte, who has written some really terrific stuff.  I hate to see those really great articles get lost in the forums, and his articles deserve more recognition and prominence than that.
  • You have some Sample Applications....
    • To be honest, I have never once looked at them to try to figure out how to do something.
    • There is no way to tell what techniques are used in each Sample Application without actually studying the application.  I assume they are just a sales tool or a "user interface idea" tool.
    • If you want developers to use the Sample Applications for code samples, you really need to include links to the specific sections of the sample applications within the core documentation.  For example, if you bring up the documentation for the WebDataGrid, it should say something like "for an example of how to xxxxxx, have a look at the sample application xxxxxx, where we use this technique on the page xxxxxx"

I know documentation is tedious, and is not really core to what you do (which is developing outstanding tools). Having a community code sample site would actually take some pressure off of your documentation team, because people could go to the community site to fill in the gaps. I am sure it would also take some pressure off of your support staff.

So here is what I am thinking would be features of a Community Code Samples website...

  • We need the code sample categories to be very specific. So if someone wants to post a new sample (or find a new sample), they can go right to their control/feature. The category definitions that you have in your Samples Browser are actually a pretty good start.
  • Within each category, we should have a mechanism where people can request a code sample on a topic, and once the code sample is provided, the request can either be marked as answered or removed.
  • Use a reputation system to recognize your most prolific contributors. Maybe reward them by offering free upgrades, subscriptions, or training, or by including them in MVP forums. These people are making a tangible contribution to your company by reducing your support costs.
  • Each contributed code sample should have an area where people can discuss it (and offer better methods). Moderators and/or the original author should be able to edit and update the original sample.  If someone suggests a better method, their reputation should reflect that, and the better method should either be listed as an alternative, or should replace the original code sample.
  • If possible, community code samples should be cross-linked to the documentation. So if I am looking at the CSOM WebDataTab page in the documentation, I should have the ability to see community-authored code samples listed right in the documentation.
    • Right now, the documentation is often a last resort when trying to find out how to do something.  This will encourage users to go to the documentation when they have a question, making it a "first resort".  This should reduce your support costs.
  • Code samples should appear in the search results of the support site.
  • Only code samples and "how to" documents are allowed. No support requests or bug reports. No whining in the discussion. Moderators should remove non-constructive posts and direct them to use the forums instead. The idea is that the site is intended to supplement the documentation, and so the content should be professional and specific.
  • Of course, they need to be RSS subscribable.

Like I said, I have put a lot of time in using your products, and fleshing out this proposal.  I believe that this suggestion offers some real gains to your company in reduced documentation and support pressure.  That translates to real dollars and cents in reduced support costs.

Even more than that, it will help galvanize the loyalty of your user community.  Your talented users will feel appreciated, and your new users will more quickly tie in to the sense of community.  That translates into real dollars and cents in increased sales and retention.

I hope you will consider it.

Thanks,

Rob Hudson

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  • 746459
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    Rob:

    Thanks – thanks for the time you took out of your day to write to us. Thanks for the time you spent thinking through a challenging problem and thanks for pointing out how Infragistics can improve to benefit not only you, but all of our customers.

    You’ve mentioned a number of issues here and I am going to do my best to carefully deal with each one. Please don’t hesitate to correct or guide me as I work through these issues because your feedback is invaluable.

    Even though Infragistics is, as viewed by many, a ‘controls vendor’ – that by no means diminishes our commitment to customer support. We have teams that live and breathe the developer support, documentation, samples and design experiences for our customers. The bottom line is we care deeply about how each of these departments relate to you – so your suggestions, thoughts and ideas are welcome anytime.

    Your proposal for leveraging the Infragistics customer community by strengthening code samples and making content more discoverable makes a lot of sense. To begin, though, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is the highest priority among the company at this time surrounds shipping our new corporate website. Now that may not sound relevant to our discussion but please allow me to explain.

    We have recognized that one of the main difficulties that our customers face is the daunting task of trying to find information. Right now information about our products is scattered across the myriad of Infragistics web properties making it hard for customers to know where to go for what information. The bedrock feature of our new website is an integrated faceted search that not only returns search results from:

    • forums
    • help topics
    • product samples
    • blogs
    • videos
    • product marketing information

    …but also allows you to filter in or out the types of content (blog posts, samples, forums, etc.) you want along with related tags. The ability to search across all the content silos of the company and quickly narrow down to what you are looking for will, I certainly hope, provide a much more effective way of getting the answers you need.

    Note: Our current site has a “global” search available at http://www.infragistics.com/support/get-help.aspx, but the search in our new site far out-performs this search engine.

    Now for the bad news. Based on our research we stopped putting resources behind code samples because the response we’ve heard is a desire for more in-depth samples and topics that extend beyond the base-level concepts and code snippets. Unfortunately code samples, as they stand today, haven’t met the needs for more comprehensive learning. But as they say, “never say never”.

    From what I understand your desire is to address: how can Infragistics open up access to our rich community of customers to enable better collaboration? Our past hesitation to granting open access to areas of our sites is rooted in some bad experiences we encountered with users not being responsible with the power to post content to our sites. Invariably these problems lead us to consider very carefully what we are able to make open to the public and what needs to be locked down.

    Therefore what I would like to do is to get you in contact with a member of our Interaction Design Team, Riddhima Shelat. She is about the business of making sure our new website is usable, beautiful and fulfills the needs of our customers. Perhaps we can work together to find a reasonable answer to how we can open up the keys to the kingdom more?

    Another point you mentioned is that our documentation is a “last resort” in the options you consider while attempting to learn how to use Infragistics’ products. I’d love for that not to be the case and I’d like to share some of proactive steps we are taking to increase the quality and coverage of our documentation:

    Focusing on the Important and the Urgent

    With each release cycle we face the same dilemma. How much of our resources do we allocate to shoring up existing samples and documentation and how much of those resources are pointed toward supporting content around the latest release?

    For the most part the Product Guidance (PG) team has placed the highest priority on supporting new products. After all if customers don’t have resources to learn new products how will they ever start using them, right? The problem with this mindset is that more in-depth content that we would have liked to provide during the previous release is often skipped in light of providing new content for new features.

    To speak to this problem we are instituting a new PG role which is reserved 100% during a release cycle for working with existing documentation. People in this role will:

    • work with our Developer Support department to cover common pain points
    • create more advanced-scenario samples and topics
    • work with our Engineering team to find deficiencies in our API documentation

    My hope is that by establishing and supporting this role existing issues among product samples and documentation will dissipate over the long run.

    Enhancing the Presentation

    We are currently looking at a few options that present some ways for us to change direction regarding how we provide content on the web and on our customer’s machines. Our current approach is too restrictive to really allow us to make our content as discoverable as possible. We are looking toward updating our tooling and processes that will allow us to better present our content that better facilitate searching, scanning content and provide an overall better experience with our content.

    Improving Quality

    In the past Infragistics has used outside editing firms who were responsible for editing our documentation. The feedback we would get would be to fix a few grammatical errors and correct some spelling mistakes.

    Today we have established in-house editing staff. Going far beyond a few spelling tweaks our editing team is working hard to build a “consistent voice” among our documentation and help enforce a higher standard among our written work.

    Further, we are adopting the Information Mapping writing technique to create documents that are clearer, easier to scan and that help readers find and understand relevant content faster than ever.

    Since I still don’t feel like I’ve provided a good enough answer for you regarding your overall question, I’ll pursue this further with our design and development teams to see if there are some features of our new website that we can build around exposing more to community contributions. While we won’t be able to introduce anything beyond our current project plan in the first version, perhaps with some design interaction we can create something that will work for a coming release of the site.

    Further, as I read your post I was wondering if you could help me by understanding better the answers to the following questions:

    1

    What does good “How to” content look like?

    I don’t want to make any assumptions here. We have some ideas, but I’d love to get your perspective on exactly what you’re looking for.

    2

    How can we make showcase samples more relevant while still being flexible enough for change?

    One issue I see with your suggestion for deep linking into the showcase samples is that we must be able to account for change. When the code in a sample is updated then there is a risk that a description in a topic is then out of sync.

    What would you like to see?

    3

    Would you be in support of us somehow integrating something like the code samples in the same structure of our feature samples?

    Doing this may give you the organizational structure you’re describing and make a clean way to integrate some other approach in our existing framework.

    4

    Can we contact you outside the forums for feedback regarding our new website and other advancements we’re considering?

    Your experience with our products, well-crafted insight and obvious desire to see conditions improve make your direct feedback coveted.

    Thanks once again, Rob. I know some of what I’ve discussed goes beyond the original scope of your post, but I hope that you see that I share all this information in the spirit of demonstrating that we are dedicated to the process of continually improving your interactions with us on all levels.

    We won’t always get it right and much of what we are doing represents a long-term dedication to improvement, but together I think we can make some significant change.

    Best,

    Craig

    PS: I have included my contact information along with some of my colleagues at Infragistics if you or any others would like to continue this conversation on this thread or by any other means that is most convenient for you.

    Craig Shoemaker
    Product Guidance Manager
    cshoemaker@infragistics.com
    951-310-4496
    @craigshoemaker

    Stephani Smyth
    Director, Developer Support
    DSManager@infragistics.com
    609-448-2000 X 1139

    Riddhima Shelat
    Interaction Designer
    RShelat@infragistics.com
    609-448-2000 X 1258

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