An idea is to make a popup that comes up occasionally (maybe once a month or so) when starting/closing the application. This popup could do several things that could increase the participation of users, for example:

a) Provide encouragement for involvement. Like "Do you like this application? Help improve it by visiting our forums and let us know what you think!".

b) Provide direct links to ongoing user surveys. This is a golden one for any application I really think. In UI-design, contact and feedback from the end-user (the people that actually use your application) is golden. Especially for smaller development teams, where you've been developing/designing the same application for very long, which of course makes every part of the UI natural and intuitive to you
Since it's free and open source, people hopefully/likely won't mind helping out this way. Not everyone has the economy to donate actual money to all projects around there, but anyone can sit down and state pro's, con's and perceived issues with the software. You just need an incentive (that the dev actually care about what you think, and the fact that you can use the software for free is probably usually very well enough) and an easy way of doing it. An ongoing, shorter survey (5-10mins maybe) can give tons of very very valid and good information form your actual users.

c) Provide an easy way to donate. Some people actually have a good income and can without a doubt donate money. Nicely asking to donate spare cash if you're satisfied could probably generate some donations this way, if people also are somewhat frequently reminded of it.

I have some experience of both UI-design and the principles around that, and also constructing good surveys, and I would love to help out in any way I can. Like someone else in this thread said, not everyone can code, but that shouldn't stop them from being able to contribute.

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:35 PM, Devin Anderson <surfacepatterns@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Gabbe,

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 9:21 AM, Gabbe Nord <gabbe.nord@gmail.com> wrote:

> 1. An easy way to provide this feedback, and encouragement to do so.
> There's IRC, mailinglists and forums for this, but most apps actually lack
> encouragement for feedback. Something as simple as writing "If you like this
> software and have ideas/suggestions, please use [insert_method_here] to
> contact us, all suggestions are appreciated!". The worst thing that could
> happen is that the suggestion isn't used, but I think tons can be gained by
> making the user feel more involved.

Excellent! This is a start. I can add something like this to the
'About' dialog of my applications.

Questions:

1.) What else can I do, as a developer, to make users feel more involved?
2.) On a similar note, what else can I do, as a developer, to make
developers feel more involved?

> 2. Appreciation for the feedback. Some devs are better then others on
> this, but I sadly think it's fairly common that users who try and provide
> feedback either get treated as complete idiots, or that the dev takes it as
> some form of personal insult.

I've seen developers do this. It's really unfortunate.

Thanks for your feedback! :)

--
Devin Anderson
surfacepatterns (at) gmail (dot) com

blog - http://surfacepatterns.blogspot.com/
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