How User-driven Innovation Works at Zmags

No company lives on an island. Especially not when working in the IT business, where continuous product development most often is the core of the business and the driver for company expansion. The feedback and level of satisfaction from your customers is your compass when planning what should be the future characteristics of your products and services.

“Not all the smart people in the world work for you”

At Zmags, we want to encourage user innovation in the development of our products and services. Just like Chesbrough’s quote, we believe that all parts benefit from user innovation in the long run. Our SaaS-based distribution model is excellent for continuous improvements, as neither our customers nor readers of digital editions are troubled when we launch new features. Also, we are also strongly committed to helping our customers become successful when using our ICM services.

Here is a recap of how we invite you to help us do things better:

Back in June we launched the Zmags Community. One of the key features in the community is the Ideas section, where you can submit ideas for further improvement of our tools. In addition, you can browse through the existing ideas, submit your vote, and add a comment if you have suggestions that can make an idea even better. We can’t promise to implement all of the submitted ideas – last month alone we had 15 new suggestions – but the community’s submitting, voting and discussing of ideas gives us a clear overview of what improvements can most benefit our customers and readers. So please be sure to have a look at the idea forum.

Turning words into action

With the November release, we have successfully implemented two of the most popular ideas from the community, both related to the search function. The idea of highlighted search fields was on the drawing board back in June, when we decided to publish it in the ideas section. Due to the amount of positive feedback this idea got, we decided to develop it together with the idea of unlimited search. This idea was suggested by one of our customers, who also did a good job explaining why this feature was more than just nice to have. Our product development team began contacting this customer directly, once we decided to focus on search for the November release.

At the time we planned the release, both ideas were among the top 10 most popular ideas. The picture is ever-changing, but the Ideas section brings transparency to customers as well as to the planning of future enhancements.

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