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://es.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:

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:

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

He says simply "Frustrated here trying to do one of the most common things possible in JavaScript for WebTab. Change the tab. Can't find it anywhere."  http://forums.infragistics.com/forums/t/59071.aspx

This guy isn't a slouch.  He's been with Infragistics since the classic controls.  If a seasoned user is having this much trouble trying to use the documentation to perform simple tasks, how much more do new users struggle?

And is there actual documentation to answer his question?  Yeah, there is technically documentation.  Nested 6 levels deep, buried beneath topics on namespaces and classes, in a property description.  There is no place to go to get a simple answer to the question "How do I do this very common task..."

Today, I spent much of my day teaching one of my junior developers how to customize output in the WebDocumentExporter and WebExcelExporter CellExported events.  Why?  Because he came to me and said "I looked everywhere, and I can't find documentation on how to customize output."  He didn't even have an inkling that the CellExported event is where you would want to do this kind of customization.

I knew how to do it... but how?  Not because of anything in the documentation... but because of a code sample Tsvetelina posted in the forums in response to one of my questions. 

Ultimately, this lack of documentation cost me in development time weeks ago, when I had to hunt it down.  It cost Tsvetelina (and by connection, it cost you) in her taking the time to respond.  And it cost me twice again today both for me and my helper, in the time it took to train him.  If IG would have afforded me the opportunity, I would have gladly taken what I showed him and posted it as a code sample to a public library to prevent this from happening to others.  But as it is, it is simply valuable time lost... for me, my protege, Tsvetelina, and the next chap who has this question (and Tsvetelina again when she has to respond to his support request).

That is four separate times this one lack of documentation has cost both of our companies valuable time... needlessly.  And several of them could have been avoided.

What really baffles me is why Tsvetelina wasn't given the opportunity to post the code sample into the core documentation... redeeming herself from having to answer the same questions over and over again.  She's internal, knowledgeable, and immensely helpful.. but even she can't contribute code samples to an easy-to-use library.  It sounds to me like the worst side of politics.

I really believe that if you shift the focus of the documentation away from "What are the technical specifications of xyz" to "How do I?" I think that solves most of the problems.

But I recognize that that sounds much easier than it actually is.  Just the math of it is daunting.  The number of useful tasks a person can perform with your tools is some multiplication of the combination of features, increased again by multiplying the combination of controls.  It's a massive project.

As you mentioned, resources are limited, and resources are weighted toward documenting new features.  I don't personally think you can accomplish a project of that scale while limiting yourself to only staff sources.  Without leveraging the community, the achievement of a comprehensive "how do I?" library may be impossible.

If you will humor me, let me describe my ideal Infragistics documentation site.

Regarding documentation... and I can't underscore it enough...This could be a mission statement for the documentation team. A person should feel confident that if they go to the documentation, they will find the answer in an intuitive way.  Even if the documentation doesn't have the actual information, it will contain a current intelligent link to some resource that has the information.  And most of the time anyone goes to the documentation, their question is "How do I...?".

The documentation as it is now is basically a static help file.  Instead, it should be a dynamic, breathing, growing documentation website, which is cross-linked by feature to *everything*.  The tree structure that you have now is fine, because it provides structure and organization, but content within each document should be dynamic.  Within each page of the documentation, you should have links to the following:

• links to samples and blogs related to the selected document page
• links to recent (and stickied) forum posts related to the control in question.  
• links to known bugs related to the current control/feature
• links to a roadmap (and service release ETA) for the current control/feature
• a link to a moderated forum thread specifically discussing that page of documentation
• By the way, your support staff needs to be able to contribute to the documentation... if only to keep them from having to answer the same questions repeatedly.  Give Duane, Victor, and Tsvetelina a place to shine!

Second, my ideal Infragistics support site should have a comprehensive "How Do I..." library.  This is where you need samples of how to do everything, from the basic to the advanced. 

I feel that that can't be fully accomplished without community involvement, but that's not my decision. But even if you only increase scope to allow contributions by internal support staff, it would be a lot better than it is. 

Right now, it appears your support staff can only contribute to the forums.  I have worked support.  They would love to contribute to the documentation, if only to make their own jobs easier.  Just let them contribute to the samples library.  Want to know how to download a WebExcelExporter spreadsheet asynchronously?  Duane Hoyte's article is there instead of being lost in the forums.  Want to know how to change a selected tab in Javascript?  Tsvetelana fielded a support question on that, so she posted a sample for all to benefit.

Thank you, and cheers,

-Rob

•  
  • If you want to improve your search engine, I propose that the best way to do that is to focus on better categorizing information.  If you focus on categorizing information, you can use that category knowledge to enhance the relevance of your search results, making both systems better.
  • Another note on searches... Giving your content authors (including forum posters) a structured tag system to help categorize their content and declare its relevancy to searches would help.  When I wrote the forum post this morning on conditional formatting, I tried to use the "Select Tags" feature.  It is a complete mess.  You really need to have someone clean it up, and disallow the public from creating new tags.
    • A random thought about tags...  I have never seen a hierarchical tag system, but it seems like it could be a good way to quickly (and more relevantly) categorize information.  If you have tags that are children of other tags, so that tags of children show up in search results that contain parent tags, and vise-versa, that could be a powerful thing.  It seems like it would also make it easier for the document author to select the correct tags.
      
• Showcase Samples Database - I am not sure what you mean by "Showcase Samples".  Are those the Application Samples that you have written?  http://samples.infragistics.com/aspnet/AppSamplesOverview.aspx
  
  
• New Samples Browser Interface - Honestly, the general feeling I have about this interface may have more to do with confusion I experienced upon first impression than it does with the way the information is actually organized.  Here is what happened when I first encountered the new Samples Browser.
  • When I clicked a control, I lost the list of controls at the top.  It wasn't clear to me that the panel had collapsed, or even that it was expandable.  I had to go back in the browser to retrieve the list of controls again, because it wasn't obvious that I should click the "+" sign to re-expand the pane.
  • It also wasn't immediately clear to me that there were "pages" of controls in the pane.  The little dots just don't communicate intuitively the concept of pages.  It took a bit to figure out where all of the controls had gone.
  • What's with the color scheme?  White on light blue?  blah... talk about hard to look at and read.  Makes it painful to use.
  • My first thoughts on seeing the new Samples Browser was (and still is) that you are alienating potential customers, because a) They may see only the controls on the first page, and think that's all there is... and b) the user interface is so clumsy (and colors so badly chosen) that it damages credibility as a controls vendor.  Honestly, because it's public-facing to potential customers, I would not wait until the next scheduled release to change out the samples browser.
  • All that said, I do understand where you are going with organizing the controls in a non-tree view.  But you already have better options.  Why not use something like the interface that pops out when you choose "Explore the Controls" on the ASP.Net product page?  All the controls are there, you don't have to scroll or go through pages to find what you're looking for, and it's very easy to read.
    • The fact that I like that format so much better prompts me to ask the question... where is multi-column flyout support in the WebDataMenu?  *hint hint*
      
• Creating Dynamic Content - By using raw search results to populate dynamic content, you risk placing irrelevant content on the documentation page.  In my attempts at using global search tonight, most of the results were irrelevant.  I think it could work, if you direct the search engine to weight more heavily for tags or other strong metadata.  You would want those results to have stricter relevancy rules than a casual user entering a search into a search box.  I think having this come from search is probably the only realistic first step to improving the situation.  However, the long-term goal should be to have this come from a strong categorization system that your content authors use religiously.
• Building Cohesive Structure - I do like the idea of having a "How Do I" section that pulls dynamically from a "How Do I" tag.  It's strongly categorized, it is relevant, and it is guaranteed to be useful.  The challenge will be how to keep irrelevant articles from popping up on the wrong pages.  For example, a "How Do I" article on customizing the WebDataGrid Filter behavior may show up in the WebDatagrid Sorting documentation page if the article includes sample code that tangentially includes the sorting behavior.  It seems like it would have to ignore article content and use tags or other strong metadata exclusively... putting a lot of emphasis on content authors to tag the article correctly.
  
• Code Snippits - Hurray!  Best news in ages...  I actually had a brainstorm on this topic yesterday afternoon.  If I were running your developer support team, I would attach some prestige and incentive to authoring content.  "How many support calls can you answer without actually having to take the support call"?  Every time a user gets their answer from a document the support person authored, it's actually an answered support call, without the pain of actually having the call.  Track hit statistics on the documents they author, and have contests and incentives based on how many unique views their documents receive.  They only way their documents receive views is if they are highly relevant and helpful.  And if their document is getting a lot of views, it is saving the company a lot of money.  Plus, if their document gets a lot of views, then it probably should be added to the core documentation.
  
  Until you mentioned it, I hadn't considered drawing a distinction between sample code snippits and articles.  To the end-user asking the question, there isn't a difference.  The only distinction between the two is length.  When I ask a question, I don't know how long the response will be. If my question is "How do I change a WebTab using Javascript?"  the answer happens to be 2 lines of code.  If I ask the question "How do I conditionally format summaryrow values?" the response is complicated and closer to 50 lines of code.  An answer is an answer, whether it is a snippit or an article.
  
• Crafting "How Do I" content - Having me critique the igGrid object is interesting, because I have no knowledge of the igGrid at all, so this is a true first perspective.
  • Somewhere near the top of the document, there needs to be a jump list to the relevant sections.  You have to scan through the whole document to find out what the sections are.
  • Everything that you have there is very necessary reference information.  It all has to be in the documentation.  There certainly isn't anything that I would remove.  But a "How Do I" section at the end, with each "How Do I" question being listed in the jump list at the top of the document would certainly add to the document's usefulness.
  • When I think of "How Do I" questions related to columns and column layout, the questions are:
    • How do I define and globally format columns?  (you have a section on that)
    • How do I conditionally format column based on values?  (no information on that)
    • How do I "do stuff" with columns after they are defined (move, sort, resize, hide, and filter)?  (if there is information on any of these, it's not obvious on first scan).
  • The content author would have been helped if, after writing all that is there, he had considered the question:  "Now that the end-user, putting together a real business application, has the columns defined, what might he want to do with them?"
    
• Organizing "How Do I" content - Content Type is less relevant than Subject.  I would want my results categorized by Subject first, with an icon next to each item indicating Content Type.  Within each subject, I would want results sorted by relevance, and the Content Type absolutely contributes to relevance.  Authoritative sources such as Documentation, Videos, Blog Posts, etc, have got to be rated higher in relevance than forum posts, which I would expect to appear, but low on the list.  Where forum posts are concerned, the author should also be considered in terms of relevancy.  Staff sources are more relevant, and public users less relevant, with some weight given to reputation score.
  
  I would add one other important metric.  That is level of complexity.  Whenever I am searching, I want to be able to focus on articles that match my experience level with the control.  I always have a sense of whether the topic I am looking for is "Advanced" or "Beginner".  If I am new to a control, I generally want to focus on the Beginner articles.  If I am experienced, I want to focus on the Advanced articles.
  
• Other Resources Beyond Sample Topics - Love the cheat sheet!  I had no idea this existed.  Truly wish I had this when I was going through the pain of learning WebDataGrid and migrating from UltraWebGrid.  I absolutely love having all of the CSOM sample code right there in an easy-to-access location.  This is a resource I have already saved to my desktop, and will use repeatedly.
  
  I have some vague recollection that you have "Startup Solutions", but I haven't looked at them in a very long time.  It's possible that they are very helpful and valuable, but because I have never seen a search result or documentation topic that directed me to look to them for an example of how to do something, I just haven't.  I think they fall in the same category as the Application Samples.  When I am looking for the answer to a "How Do I?" question, I don't have time to study an application to see if it might have the answer.  I need you to tell me in a document or search result that that is where the answer is.
  
  I am considering starting Windows Phone 7 development, and am pretty new to Silverlight much less the WP7 platform.  In that case, if you have a "Startup Solution" that is a general application framework built with some combination of your controls that I could use to get a jumpstart, that would include splash screen, initial structure, and navigation elements, I would consider that very valuable indeed.
  
  Don't ditch the Startup Solutions just because I and others haven't used them.  The issue may have to do with discoverability, not usefulness.

Just now finding out about the Cheat Sheet prompts me to add one more topic to our conversation... That is how to communicate new information to end users.

Information subscription needs to be centralized, and topic-based.... with the option to subscribe to notifications across all sources based on topic. 

Right now, just looking at the Community ASP.Net tab, let's see what information I can subscribe to and what my notification options are...

• If I go to the main ASP.Net Home tab, I don't have any options to be notified of updates to this page, even though this is the page where you would announce breaking news.
• I can go to the forums and subscribe to email notifications on individual forum threads.   This is the only place where I can subscribe to email updates.
• Even though the Articles tab appears to be based on blogs, it does not have even RSS subscription available. No email subscription available either.
• Similarly, the Media tab doesn't have RSS or email capabilities.
• Ditto for Code Samples... no notification options
• Then lastly, and *extremely frustratingly*, I get to the Blogs tab.  And right at the top is a blog by a guy named Craig Shoemaker, with the title "Introducing the WebDataGrid / WebHierarchicalDataGrid Cheat Sheet".  And it's dated all the way back in July *sigh*.  What are my subscription options to the Blogs tab?  tragically, none...  
• And I just now see a section called Pixel8, which is a podcast series.  I love podcasts!  Why didn't I know about its?  Presumably, because I didn't take the time to come to the site and specifically search out the content.  Finally a page with at least RSS capability... guess I'll have start using an RSS reader.  I would rather get the notification in an email.

Pretty much, if you guys post anything to any of the tabs in the ASP.Net support page, it is only discoverable by users if they manually come to the site and click on each tab looking for new content.  I don't have time to do that.  Maybe that's one reason your posts to these pages don't yield impact that you might hope for?

How should subscriptions work?  I want to be able to subscribe to email updates *by topic across all sources*.  I don't want to have to subscribe to each source individually.  I work with a handful of controls, but I use those controls very heavily.  I want to have a subscription option that says "send me all new posts about the WebDataGrid, regardless of whether that post is a blog, article, code sample, video, or whatever new source you might introduce".

Thanks,

-Rob

http://blogs.technet.com/b/onescript/

Thanks, - Rob

"The layout is awkward, but forgivable.  Try this link:  http://es.infragistics.com/products/aspnet/data-grid/help?page=2.  On my screen, the results start at the bottom of the page, forcing me to scroll down just to see them.  If you click the link to get the next page of search results, you are placed back at the top of the page and have to manually scroll again."

IMO IS NOT FORGIVABLE, the User Experience is emabrassing ... especially by those who promote it as an added value, which is ;)

This issue on their WEB UI probably shows that it is more difficult to create a full UI that the individual components.

I always had a feeling from IG ... that it is a bit "away" from the real world of theirs customer, but is a my sensation ... not the reality ;)

However, congratulations, you have made progress, but do not stop!
The leadership must be keep it! I think Rob has given you most valuable advice, more than a cold consultant ;)
Best,
Davide.

The layout is awkward, but forgivable.  Try this link:  http://es.infragistics.com/products/aspnet/data-grid/help?page=2.  On my screen, the results start at the bottom of the page, forcing me to scroll down just to see them.  If you click the link to get the next page of search results, you are placed back at the top of the page and have to manually scroll again.  I can live with that, as long as the results are relevant, which they are.

I am struggling a little with the color scheme.  Light-blue links on white background looks terrific on my desktop, but on my laptop it is hard on the eyes to try to read.

I am a little annoyed that the forum is aggressively removing markup from posts.  I love to use bullets, and the HTML editor has bullets in the toolbar, but they are stripped out of forum posts.

My one piece of advice is this:  While you guys are fine-tuning the organic search function, you should make the support page default to "Control Specific Help".  Don't make people spin their wheels with organic search when the drill-down tool is presently much more helpful.