Before I worked on Zune, I worked on Windows Media Center - specifically, on TV signal setup and recording. Media Center has a really active community (not run by Microsoft) called The Green Button, and working with those folks over there, we started a forum called "Ask Jessica," where Media Center users could ask me questions about TV features.
One of my fave things about working at Microsoft is being able to move around the company to different projects. When I was ready to move on from Media Center, I wanted to continue my work in the user community. I also knew that I had to continue working on a consumer product.
Zune was the "duh!" choice, right. But one of the things Chad, my manager here at Zune, asked when I said I was interested was, "So how are you going to take community involvement to the next level here?"
Answering users' questions: of course. Blogging: sure. But how about this: how about design a feature out in the open? Where anyone can contribute and shape what we do?
Pretty radical for Microsoft, I've got to say.
So over in the forums, I started out with a notion. Let's design some kind of fun activity for The Social. Going back and forth for a few weeks with some users produced the idea of a music trivia game, where users can contribute their own questions. They could write questions for general trivia, or they could write "get-to-know-me" questions, like "What artist headlined the concert at which I met my husband?" (Nope, not telling. If you leave a comment and guess correctly, I'll figure out something cool to do for you.)
It took me longer than expected to write the functional specification for the thing; I had to work it in among other responsibilities, and it's out of sync with the rest of our release cycle. Honestly, I'm learning as I'm going. I've never done something like this before, where my actual work is out there for anybody to see and criticize.
And it's been kind of weird, frankly: before I posted the spec, people were eager to see it. But now that it's available, I haven't gotten any comments.
So I don't know if this experiment will be successful; I think success will be creating a small, core group of users who give great feedback and shape this music trivia game. If you want to be part of that, head over to Jethereal's Zune Blog and check out the spec; then hit up my forum and tell me what you think.