Originally posted on The Worklog.
Ensuring that we stay deeply connected with the SFF community is critical to the mission of SFFLAB, and the success of the projects we support. As such, we're excited to announce the launch of vendor subforums, in cooperation with SFF Forum. Through these dedicated sections, we'll be providing a space for creators and the community to ask questions, create informative posts, and give direct feedback to the brands we work with. These will augment the dedicated threads for announcements and development that each of our partners already manage on SFF Forum.
Astute members of the forum may know that there's already been a dedicated NCASE subforum for a while now, and indeed that's true! In mid-2017, SFF Forum and NCASE piloted such a subforum in response to some of the challenges that creators have encountered as their installed base of customers begins to grow. In particular, it was becoming clear that having everyone post questions in a single thread, or even in a few informally created threads, made it very hard for others to search for answers. It also pulled away a lot of focus from primary threads, and made it challenging to know where users were asking questions in the first place!
SFFLAB has been working independently on website enhancements (like our new brand pages) to help triage customer questions and concerns, but in the specific case of the NCASE vendor subforum, we've seen decidedly limited success so far. Certainly, we believe that these subforums can accomplish more than they do now, but we've also seen how users are already starting to post questions as individual (and thus easily searchable) threads, with the preceding conversations being rich in information. Given this, we've decided to include DAN Cases, KMPKT, and NFC in a "second round" pilot, to see if different vendors and different approaches to using this tool can uncover additional value.
To be sure, these vendor subforums remain pretty experimental in nature. They're bare at the moment, and we'll be working with each brand over time to move threads into the subforums, as well as to build dedicated FAQ and other content within them. Further, we've given broad latitude to how to use these subforums to each brand, so how one brand uses it will differ from how others do. That's very much a deliberate choice - it's through this diversity of approach that we maximize the opportunity to figure out what the best use cases are.
Ultimately, though, what will dictate the relative success or failure of these is you all, the customers and users! So we'd encourage you all to check out these subforums, and give us direct feedback about what you think of them, over the coming months.
— The SFFLAB Team
Ensuring that we stay deeply connected with the SFF community is critical to the mission of SFFLAB, and the success of the projects we support. As such, we're excited to announce the launch of vendor subforums, in cooperation with SFF Forum. Through these dedicated sections, we'll be providing a space for creators and the community to ask questions, create informative posts, and give direct feedback to the brands we work with. These will augment the dedicated threads for announcements and development that each of our partners already manage on SFF Forum.
Astute members of the forum may know that there's already been a dedicated NCASE subforum for a while now, and indeed that's true! In mid-2017, SFF Forum and NCASE piloted such a subforum in response to some of the challenges that creators have encountered as their installed base of customers begins to grow. In particular, it was becoming clear that having everyone post questions in a single thread, or even in a few informally created threads, made it very hard for others to search for answers. It also pulled away a lot of focus from primary threads, and made it challenging to know where users were asking questions in the first place!
SFFLAB has been working independently on website enhancements (like our new brand pages) to help triage customer questions and concerns, but in the specific case of the NCASE vendor subforum, we've seen decidedly limited success so far. Certainly, we believe that these subforums can accomplish more than they do now, but we've also seen how users are already starting to post questions as individual (and thus easily searchable) threads, with the preceding conversations being rich in information. Given this, we've decided to include DAN Cases, KMPKT, and NFC in a "second round" pilot, to see if different vendors and different approaches to using this tool can uncover additional value.
To be sure, these vendor subforums remain pretty experimental in nature. They're bare at the moment, and we'll be working with each brand over time to move threads into the subforums, as well as to build dedicated FAQ and other content within them. Further, we've given broad latitude to how to use these subforums to each brand, so how one brand uses it will differ from how others do. That's very much a deliberate choice - it's through this diversity of approach that we maximize the opportunity to figure out what the best use cases are.
Ultimately, though, what will dictate the relative success or failure of these is you all, the customers and users! So we'd encourage you all to check out these subforums, and give us direct feedback about what you think of them, over the coming months.
— The SFFLAB Team
