User>Driven Forums 4 U

I regularly receive comments about User>Driven and suggestions of interesting things to post. People see things they like or don't like and, for whatever reason, think of this blog and send me a link. I feel bad when I don't get around to posting things quickly enough. So, rather than be a bottleneck, I've decided to experiment with being a facilitator.

I've expanded the Forums section of User>Driven to include 4 separate discussion forums. The first is for posting just these kinds of neat usable or frustratingly unusable things people tend to send me. It's called, simply enough, the Usability Forum. There are threads there now about turn signal, spacetime, and the iPhone. Please visit and post your thoughts to get the ball rolling.

The second new forum is for product managers. Many PMs I know are lone wolf sorts. I think it comes with a job where you have to be the spokesperson/expert on your product, where your department is usually small, and where neither engineers nor marketers think of you as really part of their group. So I am hoping to provide a forum for PMs to compare notes, give and get advice, and enjoy the company of other PMs. It's called the PM Exchange Forum. If you're a PM or have an informed opinion about such things, you can jump into discussions about compensation and product management vs. product marketing right now.

I've also created a forum for a pet interest of mine (and one that I write about often). The Productivity Forum is for discussion of the tools people need in today's business world to be productive and manage their day. If you have 30 seconds now, jump in and tell me what tool(s) you use now to manage your "do do" list.

The main forum has been retained as a forum for comments on User>Driven itself. Check in here to see what changes are happening on the site, to give feedback and to make suggestions. This is the place for making User>Driven user-driven.

Forums are not useful without participants and the hardest part is overcoming the initial inertia to get a critical mass of activity. So please take a moment to drop in and post in the new Forums section right now while you're here. Thanks.