Common E-Learning Development Challenges

Dan, she's right. Can't tell you how many hours (days) we've spent troubleshooting, reporting bugs, and the bugs just being ignored. I don't do that with other software that we use. I still have reports on bugs that have not been addressed for years. Not so much of a buzz-kill as a reality check. Yes, there will be bugs in every software tool and Articulate support does do a good job at times, but for what we are paying for Articulate products, it is reasonable to push them to do a better job of addressing bugs.

Firstly Dan, in relation to your 'buzz kill' comment, let's wait and see if this 'buzz' delivers all that it is promising ;) Secondly, as I've mentioned in a previous post, I understand that with software, there are often a few small bugs to address after its initial release, when end users pick up on a few issues that should have been identified and addressed in the internal QA process prior to release. This happens, and users are pretty understanding of this within the first 6 months. Sometimes, in the instance of open source software, these bugs can go unaddressed for a year or longer as nobody is being paid to maintain the code. However, Storyline 2 is a product which has a long string of bugs found by users (or shall we call them the volunteer QA team?) which have been raised in this forum, logged as a support ticket and then left to 'collect dust' for years on end. This is totally unacceptable, because unlike open source software, the Articulate developers ARE getting paid and Articulate charges a significant fee for their product. My suggestions to the company would be to: 1) employ some additional, highly skilled people to join your QA team to identify these bugs during the development process 2) employ more developers to systematically work through the long list of bugs identified by users of the software. If the company's reason for not doing this is because their revenue is not high enough to afford this, I would say that if they actually invested in fixing these bugs, they would have a whole army of advertisers on this forum, shouting about how great a product Storyline is! Instead, their inattentiveness to the reported issues has turned these potential advocates into people who are now dismayed with their purchase of Storyline. This inattentiveness is also likely to be negatively affecting potential users/customers who read the threads in this forum. Who would blame them from opting to use another product, when they see that most threads here end with an Articulate rep saying 'log a support ticket', only to have no solution years later!). Furthermore, when these bugs relate to accessibility issues, which lead to discrimination against users with a disability, this is in fact a very serious issue of utmost importance. And if Articulate has no intention of addressing these bugs, or are going to take years to address them, then potential customers need to be aware that choosing to use Storyline will affect their ability to produce 508/WCAG compliant courseware.