October Feedback on Team Foundation Help in Dev 10 Beta 2

Last month, Beta 2 shipped, and we posted a corresponding update to the help content. Page views, ratings, and feedback have all more than doubled in October compared to previous months. Overall ratings remained higher than we had in VS2005 & VS2008, and most of the lower ratings come from topics that are effectively unchanged from those older versions. That's a good indicator that the changes we've made to be user-centric and minimalist are working.

October vs September

Trends

Looking inside, we see that growth is most dramatic in the project management content. In VS2005 & VS2008, the most viewed content were in administration, and project management was the second most viewed with about 1/3 as many page views. When we shipped Beta 1 content, project management became the most viewed area of content by a small margin. In October, though, project management content was viewed twice as often as the next most viewed area - administration. (So far in November, it's actually running at 3x the page views of administration). This suggests that bringing process guidance and help together is making our content more relevant, as we had hoped.

Page Views

It's also interesting that, although the agile guidance topics make up a fairly small portion of the content, 19 out of 20 of the most viewed topics in project management were agile guidance topics.

Ratings and Feedback

MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0 recieved the highest rating (5) and this comment: "Great stuff" .

Customizing and Managing Work Item Types recieved the highest rating (5) and a comment in another language that I was unable to translate.

Iteractions between SharePoint Products and Team Foundation Server recieved the highest rating (5) twice.

Creating a Team Project, Product Backlog Workbook, and User Story all recieved high (4) ratings. User Story recieved this comment about the help experience:

In LigthWeight-view there could be a thin vertical bar left to the navigation history frame entries with an arrow to the bottom. This way it would me more intuitive that the upper left frame contains the navigation history...

Configure Settings for Dashboard Compatibility recieved an average (3) rating and this comment:

Should make it clear that Excel Services only work on MOSS 2007 Enterprise. Single sign-on doesn't seem to work if MOSS is installed on a workgroup rather than a domain. I also haven't got Shared Services Administration working, but I don't know whenther this is workgroup-related or not.

Team Foundation Server Default Groups, Permissions, and Roles, and Team Foundation Server Permissions recieved low (2) ratings.

Share a Work Item Query recieved the lowest rating (1), and this comment: "How do I open it once I receive the query in email???". This is a topic that was touched by some reorganization, but is very similar to pre-Dev 10 content. It seems that we could have caught this if we would have analyzed the customer scenario for this content more effectively.