Voting on feature requests

[Jessethebuddy]

Hi all,

 

Don't you think it would be nice to have an upvote feature on feature request. Presonus does this to feel the pulse of what people want the most and i am sure i helps them prioritize the best strategies for the market.

Maybe the site should have such features....

[Pšenda]

 

And many others:

https://www.google.com/search?q=voting+site%3Aforum.affinity.serif.com

[Jessethebuddy]

mmm..  seems really counter productive. That would give them a clearer picture of what fans would prioritize to want to have instead of having forums with requests that are all over the place.

I guess it is their show. They run it the way they want. I like the software and getting better at it every time i  use, still missing a few tools, but beggars can't be choosers.

[GarryP]

How would people in the forums ‘voting’ for features give Serif a good idea of what users want?

[JET_Affinity]

Feature requests need pro and con discussion and clear behavior description.

Someone says "Please add a Live Paint Bucket Tool!" because the only other drawing program they're familiar with is Adobe Illustrator and they seem to think "Live Paint Bucket" is some kind of universally understood generic industry standard 'feature in a box' that a development team can just pick off a shelf somewhere and plug it in, when it's just Adobe's proprietary name for its own particular implementation of what is generically known as a flood-fill feature. So would the voting 'ballot' list four (or more) 'party' candidates?:

• Live Paint Bucket Tool, identical to Illustrator's
• Fill Bounded Areas Tool, identical to Inkscape's
• Smart Fill Tool, identical to CorelDRAW's
• Smart Vector Fill Tool, identical to Canvas's

'Voting' features in an open public discussion forum are as silly as the user-created 'Poll' feature in a motorcycling forum I frequent. There's nothing scientific about them. Are we going to register to vote? What stops me from having a dozen login accounts so I can vote 12 times? What if 60% of the most experienced users are introverts who are simply disinclined to participate in such 'elections'? What if the majority actually making a living using the software are just too busy, or are not allowed to participate by their employers? What if the vast majority of users have never touched a 'Blob Brush Tool' because they can't afford Captive Customer fees and therefore they all vote "No"?

What if the majority of the users have only ever used Adobe Illustrator and don't understand that things can be better than that?

You really want the priorities of an application's development to be driven by mob rule? Building an innovative product that wins in the marketplace is not driven by simple democracy. Systematic development requires discernment about which functions comprise the most fruitful foundations upon which later higher-level features will depend. The best features are those which are cleanly integrated with each other so that the combined functionality is more elegantly powerful than just a collection of standalone functions. The feature that ends up truly 'putting an application on the map' and empowering its users the most may be something no one has ever dreamed of before.

The 'voting' mechanism is already there: You can click the reaction buttons. Yeah, they could be re-named with terms less ambiguous. But the 'mob' can't even follow the most common-sense procedures:

• Search for an existing feature discussion topic before starting yet another one. You're very unlikely to be the first person to ask for a 'Shape Builder Tool.'
• Don't post 'personalized' lists of your pet features. If the topics don't already exist, start individual topics, so they can be sensibly discussed. No one is doing a search for a topic called "Joe Blow's wishlist" just because Joe Blow thinks he's someone special. No one is going to tediously dissect individual features from Joe Blow's wishlist post and move them to their appropriate subject threads. Joe Blow may have the most valuable contribution that no one else has ever thought of on a topic, but it will be forever lost because it's merits are stirred and shaken somewhere inside an unnavigable grab bag.

JET