On October 1st, we launched the Internet Explorer Platform Suggestion Box (http://uservoice.modern.ie) on the UserVoice platform. Since then, it has been great to see the feedback flowing in as everyone adds their voice in support of their most wanted Web platform features in IE. This post provides some background on our decision to launch a UserVoice site and describes how we expect to use the site going forward.
Why UserVoice?
In April, we made a commitment to build a better two-way conversation with the Web development community. Since then, we have followed that with up with a public feature roadmap at status.modern.ie, regular #AskIE sessions on Twitter, a Reddit AMA, and early previews of upcoming IE updates.
When reviewing our feedback channels, we realized that we were missing a persistent “voice” of the developer community in terms of feature requests for the IE Platform. While feature suggestions were regularly submitted via our Connect bug tracking system, they were mixed in with other active bugs and didn’t have a clear way for others from the community to add their votes.
Luckily the UserVoice platform exists for exactly this purpose, and Microsoft had already used it effectively with products such as Windows Phone, Xbox Music, and Cortana. We also already had a site for the Windows Platform for Developers which was a natural place for the IE Platform UserVoice as part of the larger developer discussion.
Launching UserVoice
With the launch of the IE Platform Suggestion Box , we now have a great place to track feature suggestions from the Web developer community, while bug reports should continue to be reported through Connect.
Since these inbound feature requests are closely related to our outbound communication using our official roadmap at status.modern.ie, we also wanted to ensure that it is a clear connection between roadmap items and their associated vote counts on UserVoice. With the UserVoice API and Azure WebJobs, we are able to frequently sync the data so that you can also see the vote tallies on status.modern.ie:
Less than two weeks after our launch, we have already collected a lot of feedback – thank you! Some fun facts:
- 16,000+ peak daily visitors
- 359 open ideas
- 52,000+ votes tallied
Going forward
Our UserVoice site (both vote counts and comments) will be an important source of input into our feature prioritization going forward and will be regularly monitored. Features will be moved to status.modern.ie as applicable, and requests will be closed once delivered.
It is important to note that there are also many other factors that go into our actual engineering plans so it will not represent our final priority list. That said, popular requests will be given special consideration and will receive a response from the team within the UserVoice suggestion itself. This is key in our goal of keeping the conversation alive, and remaining as open and transparent as we can be.
Be heard
If you haven’t already, be sure to visit http://uservoice.modern.ie, read the guidelines about how to participate and vote for your most-wanted platform features in Internet Explorer. In addition to UserVoice, you can also reach out to @IEDevChat or file a bug on Connect.
— Jonathan Sampson, Program Manager, Internet Explorer