8:33AM Sarah Stokely | As someone who’s often frustrated by poor or incomplete user guides or product information online, I can see that the Fixya website could be a useful tool. In beta at the moment, Fixya is aiming to be a one-stop-shop for people seeking tech support, user guides and repair guides for products from a range of vendors.
Rather than a tech support business, Fixya is designed as a community, where users provide both the questions and the answers. You can browse the database of already answered questions, or pose your own question to the community of registered experts. Experts are users who have registered with the site and nominated their own area of expertise. They can post answers to the site, or help users directly via online chat.
The success of a site like this will be in attracting knowledgable people who can provide decent answers to user questions. The site encourages people to sign up and answer questions by paying them. It’s not a huge amount, a few bucks per answer posted to the site. I noticed that the Top Expert on the site has already racked up 300 solved problems, so the incentive scheme seems to be working to attract problem solvers to the site.
There are already a lot of online forums for people to discuss products and tech problems – this one might be good to browse when stuck on a particular problem – or if you don’t have a resident geek to help you. If you know of any particularly good ‘tech support’ forums, please leave them in comments.
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