Survey: Likes

Next up in our survey results, is the things that people said they liked about ProjectForum.

I will preface this by saying that most people overall seemed pretty happy; I'm sure there is no selection bias as to who completed the survey of course!

But we did get a lot of "keep up the good work" type comments, positive comments about our support, people sharing how important it is in their group's work, and some who've purchased it at each of the jobs they've had over the last few years. Thanks to everyone who shared that with us, it's very gratifying.

Likes: Easy!

Far and away, the biggest thing people liked was how easy people found ProjectForum to use. In fact, fully half of respondents put this as the very first thing they liked about PF; for an entirely write-in answer with no predefined choices I was pretty amazed by this.

Getting that right is one of the hardest things to do, but I think one of the most important for this type of tool. As best you can, you want the tool to just fade into the background, so that people can just contribute and think about what they're contributing, not the software. While I think ProjectForum is far from perfect in that regard, it's good to get the feedback that we're more or less doing this right.

The second most common like (about 10% of respondents' first choice) was also an "easy" one, namely how easy ProjectForum was to set up and administer. This has of course been another goal of ours, so good to see the feedback there.

The ease of use or ease of setup/admin came up as many peoples' second or third choices too of course, but it was just remarkable how many picked those as a first choice.

Incidentally, in the question asking you to describe ProjectForum in ten words or less, the words "easy" or "simple" came up in 30% of answers (including my favorite, "Easy, Easy, Easy, Flexible, Flexible, Flexible, Powerful, Powerful, Powerful, GREAT!").

Likes: Other

There were also a bunch of more specific "easy" answers: people found it easy to link pages, easy to upload files, easy to re-organize, easy to comment, etc.

Beyond that, we get several responses along the lines of "liked the ability to collaborate". Flexibility, adaptability, reliability also were mentioned several times as likes. Finally, a number of specific features were mentioned as "likes" (e.g. uploads, security, etc.) though no particular one really stood out.

Next time: what people dislike about ProjectForum.

Comments

[Pancho]

Thanks for sharing these results. It is nice to read about others' opinions on your neat software.

[Larry Blasingame]

Please do not drop support for Solaris just yet. With Oracle's acquisition of Sun, Solaris could take on new prominence. Anyway, I am a Solaris admin who has only just discovered ProjectForum and am looking for the right collab platform for the work groups I support.