Scenario Voting: Leveraging the Wisdom of Crowds Via Customer Feedback

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Seems it's intern day here on the blog. Here's another piece of news, this time a note from my colleague Aseem Badshah, an intern from a local high school (!) who's spending his summer working with Windows Client on incorporating customer feedback into Windows Vista:

Scenario Voting is a new way for Microsoft to listen to its customers. It leverages James Surowiecki’s theory of The Wisdom of Crowds by enabling customers to try different user-related scenarios within Windows Vista and then vote on their experience. Each vote represents a customer’s satisfaction score for a certain scenario. This information lets product teams throughout Microsoft know what they need to change, but keeps the voter anonymous.

My name is Aseem Badshah, High School Intern in the Scenario Voting group (part of Windows Core.) My summer project has been to help make Scenario Voting more usable. Until now, Windows Vista Scenario Voting has been geared towards tech beta users. We have gotten a lot of good feedback from these users and have changed quite a bit in the OS because of it. As we get closer to shipping Windows Vista, we want to make sure Scenario Voting remains a feasible way to gather feedback from people of all walks of life. Here’s where I ask for your help. Please visit the Windows Vista Scenario Voting site and take a look around. If you are using Windows Vista, then go ahead and vote on a couple of scenarios (don’t be afraid to tell us we suck, but also don’t be afraid to tell us what we’re doing right.) Then let me know what you think of Scenario Voting.

Leaving a comment would be a huge help!

Thanks in advance

-Aseem Badshah

High School Intern

So drop by the Scenario Voting site to let us know 1) your thoughts on the presentation of the site, and if you're using Windows Vista, 2) how your experience stacks up against the targets for the various user scenarios.

(Talk about making the rest of us look bad! Kind of makes you feel like you could've better spent your summers in high school, right? ;)

Thanks, Aseem !