Quote:
Originally Posted by weirichk
Any thoughts?
|
Providing my experience with professional software developement is anything to go by: you don't want to get to the development department. Developers don't make decisions about features or useability, at least, you will generally be lucky if they don't. The only reason to bring developers in contact with users is when they are troubleshooting specific, hard to reproduce bugs (and bugs are
not the same as things that don't work how you want them to - since 99% of all users does not know this there is generally one or two levels of support personel between developers and consumers to prevent them wasting their time).
Instead, you will want to reach the management level and, judging by the size of the company, useability research labs (although this implies they do some sort of useability research for their library software, something I find hard to believe). Is this feasable? Sometimes - but in my experience, the bigger the company, the less they listen to (individual) customers. Still, it goes to show that a lot of people here seem to find a free 3rd party program far superior to what they gobbled together (although it might be a good idea to create a poll on this issue since this is merely my own objective observation at this point).
If you can come up with some solid recommendations and attainable features, compile them in a good list, preferably with a clear explanation, useage scenarios and argumentation, it might come through. As an (ex-) software developer myself I have some experience with user suggestions, and requests along the lines of "do something with news feeds!" are about as usefull as a chocolate kettle, yet sadly by far the most abundant.