We want ideas for enhancements to Captivate 6!!
The Cp6 development cycle will be kicking off anytime now (if it hasn't already) and I wanted to give all Captivate users on the planet the opportunity to contribute and vote for ideas about how to make Cp6 better than any previous version.
So, I've just started a new website to gather enhancement ideas for Captivate 6: http://captivate6ideas.ideascale.com/
With this site the best ideas bubble to the top of the list because they collect the most votes! If it proves popular, perhaps this site will enable people that actually use Captivate to show which features they REALLY want to see in the next version of this great e-learning application.
Why Do This?
I've used Adobe Captivate since before version 1, when it was called RoboDemo. It's come a long way since then. I'm now using Captivate 5 every day for work, and I have to say that I love it.
But that doesn't mean it couldn't get better or that I lack ideas about how to improve it. There are lots of things about the new Cp5 interface that really bug me. And there are many other areas in the app where I'd like to see totally new functionality that would enable developers like myself to push the boundaries of rapid e-learning even further.
Of course I could just log my ideas as an Enhancement Request on the Adobe website. Or I could just send my ideas to the Adobe Captivate development team. I know a lot of the guys there because I was privileged to be invited (unpaid) on development of the last two Cp versions as part of the Pre-release Team. However, the truth is, the reports from these requests are not made public. So you never really know which items were most requested.
So how do average users like you and I get to put our message across about the features we REALLY want in the next version of our favourite tool? Easy...we just have to gang up on Adobe! :-)
My objective is to find out what other Captivate user REALLY thinks should go into Cp6. The only way to do that is to have my own independent site, unmoderated by Adobe, where I (and everyone else that registers to use it) can see the features that garner the most votes.
The Wisdom of Crowds and Crowdsourcing
A while back I read a very interesting book by James Surowieki called The Wisdom of Crowds - Why the many are smarter than the few. This book explains how groups of people can actually come up with better ideas than the brightest minds in the room. A new buzzword has been spawned to explain attempts to leverage this concept: Crowdsourcing. And now there's even a new family of software applications coalescing around it as well.
Then I stumbled across a web service called IdeaScale that offers a way for organisations to do internal crowdsourcing to gather ideas. Suggestion Boxes and other corporate attempts to generate ideas from the knowledge buried in the rank and file have been around for decades or longer.
But the thing that separates crowdsourcing apps from suggestion boxes concept is the fact that the crowd...not the management...can decide which ideas bubble to the top by simply voting for the ones they like, and against the ones they don't.
We Want Ideas, Not Bugs
One little caveat about this new IdeaScale site for Captivate 6: We only want you to contribute ideas for new or improved functionality, not requests for bug fixes. If you've found a bug in Captivate 5, you should log it here on Adobe's own website.
What Will I Do With This Information
Give it to Adobe of course! Hopefully, if there are enough good ideas and plenty of votes to indicate that these are the features users REALLY want, then Adobe will listen and make Captivate 6 the best version ever.
