We ship it – let us hear your voice

Hello everyone! My name is Karsten Rieke, and I’ve been a Product Manager at XING since 2007. Actually, my association with Europe’s leading business network started before that, both as a member, and as an HTML and CSS expert and front end web developer during the name switch from openBC to XING.

In the course of my time here, I’ve worked on a number of projects. I worked on improving the people search function on XING, and on the redesign of the member profiles. I was also involved in the migration of eConozco, the Spanish contact network, to XING in 2008. Recently, I’ve focused on projects that stretch the range of functionalities for XING. These include the XING Mobile site, and our excellent new feedback tool, UserVoice.

No chits in this voting system

If you’re reading this now, you’re probably familiar with the blog post by our Chief Product Officer, Jason Goldberg, in which he introduced our Ship It! strategy. From Day One, we knew that to do rapid development right, we’d need to do it together, working hand in hand with our members. It also became clear that we needed a new tool for gathering feedback and suggestions.

So we set up some criteria. The feedback system would have to be

• Open—More so than standard questionnaires, which are limited in their responses
• User Friendly—More so than the bug tracking device our development team uses here in-house
• Countable and combinable—In comparison with the many useful but scattered suggestions our Community Relations and Support teams receive
• Simpler for us to follow than individual member forums

So with these four criteria in mind, we started scouting around. When we found UserVoice, we were very impressed.

UserVoice is a very simple tool, and a very powerful one. Here are a few highlights for you:

• Every member has 10 votes, so make them count! Suggest the features or improvements that are most important to you. The features with the most votes will go into development first.
• You can see what other people are suggesting, and vote for someone else’s suggestion.
• You can also see how we’re coming along. There’s an icon to tell you we’ve already started developing a feature or improvement, or are reviewing it.

For us, the blend of quantitative (what’s most popular?) and qualitative (there are forums so you can add more information) is great. The system also filters out double entries with a live search, offering suggestions as you type.

And it works! Since Company Pages were launched in beta, we’ve had over 750 ideas already, over 3500 users share their thoughts, weighing in with over 23,000 votes.
So if you’ve yet to discover UserVoice on XING, give it a try. Your vote counts!