The community Q&A feature on Trip has been operating for a few weeks now. It’s still early days of the beta version (we call it a beta as it’s still being tested).

For those who’ve missed it, this feature allows you to leave a question (that you’ve been unable to find an answer to) and Trip then sends it to users best placed to answer it. It relies on the collective wisdom of the wonderful Trip community!

So far, there have been a number of positives and some areas that need strengthening, for instance:

Positives

  • People are asking questions, we’ve had over ten!
  • People are asking in languages other than English – this has surprised and delighted me.
  • I’ve really enjoying trying to answer them – reminds me of the challenges users face in answering complex questions.
  • Only one of the questions was ‘easy’ in that the answer could be found within the first few results on Trip.

Less positive

  • Not enough people answering the questions. While I enjoy it, it’s not scalable to rely on me.
  • There are a lot of interface issues that need sorting – but that’s he beauty of a beta, it’s to test things.
  • We’re still not getting the emailing right – alerting people to questions and answers.

We’ve now got lots of feedback and experience to improve the system and will be working on that over the next few weeks. This is something that doesn’t need rushing but so far I’m really pleased.

If you’ve used it, seen it (or even not seen it) we’d welcome any thoughts/comments. The more feedback we have the better we can make it.