Communication and Secrecy at Serif

[CM0]

39 minutes ago, Bryan Rieger said:

Surveys and focus groups are terrible ways of designing products, as the sample size is never truly reflective of the entire customer base (how many users will actually respond to a survey, are the questions phrased correctly, are they leading, are they meaningful), and group dynamics typically ensures that opinions of a vocal minority will influence the less vocal members towards a consensus that may not accurately reflect their opinions. They can both be useful tools, but rarely within product design/development. Serif probably already have a pretty good idea of what users want/have been asking for from these forums over the past 8 years, but actually prioritizing that feedback and putting into production seems to be the real blocker—which I suspect lies within management.

User testing of new concepts and designs with customers tends to work really well, even with small sample sizes—especially when done early in the production cycle. Not only can you test out your ideas and receive valuable feedback early, you will often gain insight into the mental models customers already have about various aspects of your products. That understanding is gold, and will often be found repeatedly as you continue to talk to your customers.

Yes, I agree on the user input, user input is an essential part of Agile development which ensures the customers have high bandwidth communication to the dev team as all features are developed alongside user feedback.  Iterative development, where the users get to experience a feature during the development cycle and influence the end result.

However, disagree on the forum.  It is simply not a good tool to be able to understand beyond the very problem you stated.  The most vocal will be that which rises to the top of awareness.  This is because the forum can't be organized, ranked or prioritized in any meaningful manner.  Things get lost in the forum as evidenced by mods who sometimes respond, "let me ping a dev again on that topic".  There is no systematic way to understand exactly how many customers are impacted by an issue or want a particular feature.

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, CM0 said:

However, disagree on the forum.  It is simply not a good tool to be able to understand beyond the very problem you stated.  The most vocal will be that which rises to the top of awareness.  This is because the forum can't be organized, ranked or prioritized in any meaningful manner.  Things get lost in the forum as evidenced by mods who sometimes respond, "let me ping a dev again on that topic".  There is no systematic way to understand exactly how many customers are impacted by an issue or want a particular feature.

I don't recall saying to use the forum as the only way to gather and prioritize what users are asking for. To me, this forum is one big focus group, representing only a tiny sample of the overall Affinity customer base. The big question should be how are Serif engaging with the rest of their customer base to better understand their needs?

[Corgi]

I guess I will have to just "agree to disagree" with those who believe surveys are unhelpful in gathering user input to aid in roadmap development.

Regarding forum feedback: I've done my share of forum reading these past few weeks, and honestly couldn't tell you whether the customer base is happy with the chosen v2 feature set or not. I'm sure Serif would have a better grip on this than I do (especially since they must get plenty of DMs). But still, I'm curious whether they view the v2 feature set as well-received or not.

[debraspicher]

The forums/social can be very beneficial for getting the feel of a user base. Obviously ignoring the "I'm loud see me roar" attention-seeking behavior and listen for the gist of most things coming in being said versus focusing in on specific "talking points" (for lack of a better term). I'm mainly talking about the negative form of these as they are very easy to become contagious among users, especially when it's added in alongside critique about how it's "not up to standard", even though it's not impacting their user all that much and they are still getting all the use possible out of the programs. The comments that should be concerning are when they can't get the usage that is advertised. This is powerful feedback.

Things that are very subjective (UI icon styles) versus usability issues. It's important to separate the two. I don't mind that Serif goes for a more classic look. I care that it's cohesive and my skills are transferable from other programs into the new setup regardless of the interface.

If I'm in the role of someone who wants my product to set a standard, if I read more than a few complaints about usability... it's in my list of things to look into first and foremost. It's high priority. It's not ignored. No reason to sort that in some sort of other schema.

[debraspicher]

10 minutes ago, Corgi said:

I guess I will have to just "agree to disagree" with those who believe surveys are unhelpful in gathering user input to aid in roadmap development.

Regarding forum feedback: I've done my share of forum reading these past few weeks, and honestly couldn't tell you whether the customer base is happy with the chosen v2 feature set or not. I'm sure Serif would have a better grip on this than I do (especially since they must get plenty of DMs). But still, I'm curious whether they view the v2 feature set as well-received or not.

I don't see how surveys can hurt. I missed the one that rolled through during V2 dev* because of childcare so it got buried in with the rest of my mail. I think if the developers are targeting something very specific in terms of an issue, then surveys can be quite helpful (more like a poll really)... if it's too general, then I can see where the results can be skewed by demographics and thus be more misleading...

[Old Bruce]

Regarding surveys: There is the, perhaps apocryphal, story that the Ford Edsel was designed to fulfill some rather extensive surveys. For those too young to remember the Edsel it was one of the worst sellers in automotive history. All I recall about it was the pushbutton automatic transmission.

[Corgi]

7 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Regarding surveys: There is the, perhaps apocryphal, story that the Ford Edsel was designed to fulfill some rather extensive surveys. For those too young to remember the Edsel it was one of the worst sellers in automotive history. All I recall about it was the pushbutton automatic transmission.

To be fair, the Edsel surveys were implemented using an extremely early, alpha version of SurveyMonkey, and the results were corrupted by a nasty VisiCalc bug.

[captain_slocum]

On 11/27/2022 at 6:33 PM, Patrick Connor said:

We reply to questions about how the software is meant to work and about bugs. We do not tend to respond to improvement requests. The software is not yet designed to do those things so it's not incorrect so much as not included yet. So no I cannot "set your mind at rest", sorry.

This thread has developed into an interesting philosophical discussion about the way a company is run, about tokenism ("Your custom is important to us") and about the way, as companies grow larger, they often become self-serving rather than customer led.

Patrick, I am sure your heart is in the right place, and I have no personal beef with you I assure you, but your reply is very telling. In my posts I have given you every opportunity to say something like "thank you for your considered feedback, your remarks will be passed to our development team for consideration" but presumably that is not how it works with Serif. This is how the whole thread started, with bemused Affinity users wondering, why the secrecy, why no roadmap, why no apparent acknowledgement of our suggestions. It just seems a pity to me that you (the company) appear to be wasting an enormous asset - a group of real-world users who care about your products.