The purpose of this blog post is to demonstrate that we are listening to your suggestions and that we are able to incorporate them into QiqoChat very quickly.  Please keep ’em coming!

Last week during Facilitate ’15, we received some great feedback on QiqoChat from members of the facilitation community.  The 30 participants were an interdisciplinary collection of professionals who focus on collaboration in various circumstances, from designing conferences and dialogues to helping organizations transform their internal collaborative processes.

This was the first public test of our “unconference call” tool where a large group of people on a conference call is able to break out into interactive, small-group discussions.  We believe this type of tool can make webinars much more engaging.

Feedback from the event was strong and positive.  People were surprised at how well a group can organize itself when given light structure.  These facilitators also had great insight about how to improve the tool to create a more fluid experience.

We are so very thankful for their enthusiasm, energy, and suggestions.  Our goal is to remain in this strong feedback loop where we continue to improve QiqoChat based the insights you share with us.

Here are the improvements we’ve made in just the last week in response to your feedback:

1. Streamline the process for jumping into an event and move some features and options back so that a new user is not overwhelmed with all features at once.
2. Displaying a simple 1-2-3 process someone can take if they cannot figure out how to turn on their audio or video.
3. Enable the moderator to assign a discussion topic for each breakout table in an event.
4. Simplify the process for participants to create new events.  This is essential for opening sessions of online conferences where participants choose the topics for the rest of the conference.
5. Enable the moderator to broadcast messages to everyone across all breakout tables so that participants know when to reconvene in the main room.
6. Prevent audio feedback if someone accidentally joins both a video and audio chatroom at the same time.
7. Unify the separate concepts of audio and video breakout sessions; make it easier to jump between audio and video breakout rooms; make it clearer that video chatrooms can have 10 participants and that audio breakouts can have unlimited participants .
8. Simplify the tech support section so people can enter and exit the conference calls easier.
9. Be able to mute participants who leave their microphone on accidentally.
10. Set all links on any event page to open up in a new window so that people do not lose their audio connection accidentally.
11. Let participants upload and share attachments.
12. Quickly show a combined list of all participants’ profiles so you can see who is present.  This also helps people introduce themselves in alphabetical order.
13. Add suggested ground rules and remind people to state their name when they speak during large calls.

And while we were at it we made a few other improvements in the past week too:

1. Integrate YouTube videos into events.
2. Add profile photos to the transcript view of each written conversation.

Here are some features and improvements you suggested and that still working on:

• Have an uber-view where a participant can see all the places where their colleagues are chatting across the entire circle at that time.

The pace of change is rapid, due to the high volume of useful feedback we are receiving.  If you have additional suggestions, please contact us or drop us a note in the comments below.