Introducing the Tabblo wink
One of the most challenging (and rewarding) things about building a software product in the midst of a community of passionate users is knowing when a feature is being rejected by the community because it’s something new and different and when it’s really something that doesn’t jive. And to boot, online apps tend to have a symbiotic relationship with their users where features evolve based on the community and the community in turn is shaped in large part by the features that the site grows which just adds complexity to figuring these types of things out.
Most of the time we feel like we’re doing a good job of that around here but our recent introduction of ratings shows that we too can miss it. Universally controversial both inside and outside of Tabblo, ratings ended up being something that we decided to launch for two reasons: 1. to help navigate the growing wealth of content on the site, and 2. to give one more axis for feedback, mostly for people who were looking for something that was somewhere between the favorites list and the comments.
The debate on why ratings were not good for Tabblo started in the forum, continued in support emails, and culminated yesterday in a tabblo by one of our users who felt strongly enough to consider quitting Tabblo altogether. We had been working on a replacement for ratings that felt more “Tabblo” and this morning we pushed it up to the site.
Introducing, the Tabblo wink.
Where the old dreaded Netflix/Amazon/YouTube 5-star widget used to be, we now have a small Tabblo icon. If you mouse over it, you will see a “Wink if you like this tabblo.” Winks are then used as an input to determine what shows up on the “popular” page (and to avoid people who may want to game the system, we’re not quite ready to say exactly how we weigh them) but nowhere else on the site. That is, you’ll never see a “this tabblo has X winks” message, and we may just never divulge just how much a wink counts for.
I hope that this is acceptable to everyone who chimed in over the last couple of weeks on all sides of this debate (both inside and outside of Tabblo). For sure I can not promise that we won’t have other equally controversial features coming down the road, but I can least promise you that when we do, we will address the issues that come up in the same way we did with ratings— openly and collaboratively with you all.