Channel 9 - What works, what sucks?

What works (for me):

[1] The videos are great.  Especially those of the research area and some of the latest ones.  It definitely personalizes the site.

[2] The forums are great also, although the coffeehouse gets the most activity it seems.

[3] I like the "Citizen Engineers" section, although I wish there were more contributions to it.

[4] The sheer amount of content that has been put onto this site in the past few months in incredible.

What needs work:


[1] There seems to be a few formatting issues in the message/editing boxes (especially with the creation of bulleted lists...it is chaotic).

[2] The organization of the videos.  Although I do not have a great deal of time to look at these, the organization needs some help.  Maybe small pics of each video could be spread out across the page, along with tool-tip brief descriptions of each.  That may increase load time, however, on slow connections.  If you want to really want to take things to a metaphoric extreme, you could make it look like a real video library in someone's house...with videos stacked horizontally...and then as the user hovers over each "spine", an image rotates out with a description and the first frame of the video.  Oh, and allow for sorting, too.

[3] Video transcripts.

[4] I agree with the idea above of having more contests. What form these should take, I don't know.  Maybe you could have some kind of promotion where clues get buried across videos or in staff posts, with the intent of having users gather up the clues and try to solve either a riddle, or locate something on the site.  The winner gets a t-shirt or some piece of software (whatever could be legally done).  You could probably even make it like the St. Paul Winter Carnival medallion hunt (something they do here in Minnesota every winter).  Who knows.  I would think that might draw some people in and get them to loiter a bit longer.  The coding contest is great, though.

[5] Info/views from other Microsoft sites around the planet...it is interesting to see how other teams tackle their language/interface issues.  The India site is a start.

[6] Free beer.

[7] Perhaps allow an interview or two submitted by members (after your staff reviews it of course).  This could either come in video, audio, or written form.

[8] Organize the threads better, either by dividing it into more forums (News - where people can post assorted links instead of in the coffeehouse).  The problem, too, with threads is that as this site grows, a lot of topics get repeated.  The old threads get buried, and a week or two later the exact same topic pops up in a new thread.  I'm sure in a few weeks, a new SMOKING thread will appear after the old one drops out of sight.  I don't know if the search feature is the ultimate answer to this, but maybe it is only a part of it.  An ultimate way to organize it would be to allow a user to organize the threads on a page the way they see fit, instead of just by date/most recent post.  Maybe allow them to group by topic?

jsrfc58/Mike