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A Year of Change: Reflecting on 12 months of Storyline development
Since stepping into the CTO role at Articulate in early 2023, I've had the privilege of diving deep into our customer experiences. Back then, it quickly became clear that while there was a lot of love for Storyline, there were valid frustrations around unresolved bugs, lack of transparency, missing 64-bit support, and insufficient communication from our engineering team.
Hearing you loud and clear
About a year ago, your feedback was unmistakable: we needed to listen better. I shared our engineering teams’ commitment to change in a post titled, “Storyline under a Microscope: An update from the CTO”, and I'm thrilled to talk about the strides we've made since.
Our Shift in Focus
Today, our conversations with customers are future-focused, revolving around quality, advanced capabilities, and accessibility. It’s a shift from frustration to anticipation, and while we haven’t solved every issue, the progress is undeniable. So let’s review the key themes from the past year and highlight the progress we made on the journey.
Reflecting on Key Themes: Quality, Transparency, and Communication
Quality became focus number one for our team. In a nutshell, we hit pause on all new features to zero in on fixing existing issues, aligning our teams more closely for better quality control, diving into real customer scenarios to guide our releases, and doubling down on modernizing Storyline, including launching a 64-bit version in beta. In more detail:
- Prioritizing Quality Over Features: We took a strategic pause on developing new features for Storyline for six months, dedicating this period solely to enhancing product quality. The entire Storyline Engineering Team shifted their focus to addressing and resolving existing quality issues, ensuring a stronger foundation for our product.
- Unifying our Approach for Better Results: Previously, our Engineering, Quality Assurance, and Support teams worked independently on Storyline releases, which sometimes led to siloed efforts. We've since revamped our approach, bringing these teams into a cohesive unit. This collaboration ensures we can identify and address quality issues more efficiently, resulting in faster and more effective solutions.
- Learning Directly From User Experiences: In partnership with David Anderson, our Director of Customer Training, we've integrated real-world course-building scenarios into our testing process. These scenarios, reflective of our customers' daily challenges, are now a crucial part of validating each Storyline update before it goes live. This practice has not only improved our issue detection but has also deepened our understanding of what our users truly need.
- Modernizing Storyline: A year ago, we reinforced our commitment to Storyline by launching the first 64-bit version, Storyline 360 x64, in a public beta. We're now in the final stages of preparing Storyline 360 x64 for widespread release and are actively working on additional modernization projects to ensure Storyline continues to meet the evolving needs of our users.
Along with our investment in quality, we recognized the need to increase transparency to clarify how we make decisions around what we work on.
Commitment to Transparency
Starting last year we committed to being more transparent about how we approach building and maintaining Storyline. We opened up about our decision-making process, our progress toward reducing unexpected errors, and our plans for addressing long-standing bugs. Our revamped bug triage process ensures we're responsive and focused on what matters most.
- Reducing the error rate: When we started this effort in April of 2023, about 3% of Storyline sessions were encountering an unexpected error. We committed to getting this metric under 1%. As of March 1, 2024 1.2% of Storyline sessions are encountering an unexpected error. We’ve worked hard to reduce these errors and we won’t stop until we get under our 1% goal because any error that interrupts your day is like a “paper cut” in your way.
- Staying “below five”: Twelve months ago, we discovered we had stopped paying attention to “older bugs”. So we focused our attention on not just recent issues but all bugs that had five customers or more. We have 100s of thousands of users, and set a line in the sand that all bugs must stay “below five customers” otherwise we stop feature development to fix. We cleaned up our backlog of bugs affecting five or more customers and Storyline is much stronger for it.
- Revamping our bug triage process: Our bug database was, admittedly, a bit of a mess in April of 2023 and it was difficult to find signal in the noise. The right things were not always getting prioritized. So along with jumping on those older bugs, we revamped our daily bug triage approach to prioritize new bugs in the latest releases. We also started tracking the overall defect rate coming in from support cases to drive it below 10%. These changes helped us jump on issues causing pain quickly so that it didn’t spread.
To reinforce our quality and transparency commitment, we recognized the need to increase communications to ensure your concerns were being heard and addressed.
Emphasis on continuous communication
In summary, monthly updates last year have kept you informed. We’ve increased our engagement with you through direct conversations and expanded our beta program, ensuring your voice is heard and valued.
- Monthly updates from Engineering leadership: Storyline’s engineering leader, Jesse Taber, provided monthly “State of Storyline” updates as comments on my original E-Learning Heroes post. In Jesse’s final update in September 2023 after we took Storyline out of Code Red, he committed to continue providing updates on a quarterly basis.
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- The first quarterly Storyline quality update is now available.
As a bonus, Jesse also wrote a separate article all about 64-bit Storyline.
- The first quarterly Storyline quality update is now available.
- Commitment to working directly with you: We spoke with a lot of customers last year to learn about their experiences using Storyline 360 and have made that a regular practice. The insights from those conversations are invaluable. We also expanded participation in our private beta program by 55%! We love working directly with our private beta customers to gather feedback about new features and hear about issues. If you’re interested in a more direct line to our engineering team, please e-mail beta@articulate.com.
Looking Forward
As we move forward, balancing innovation with quality remains our unwavering commitment. Vanessa Fage, leading our Storyline quality team and beta program, is a testament to our dedication to continuous improvement and open communication.
A Year of Collaboration
This journey has reinforced the value of working directly with you, a lesson we'll carry forward to ensure we never stop listening again. Your trust fuels our progress, and for that, we’re profoundly grateful.
Thank you for inspiring us and for being a pivotal part of Storyline's evolution.
This is great information, thank you so much for responding so promptly and thoroughly!
LaurenMalfatti : Instead of marking your thank-you reply as the solution to your question, it would be better to mark Sam's reply as the solution. That would keep it at the top of the page. And, since solutions are tracked, it will also give him the credit he deserves.
Done! Thank you for letting me know, I've never used that feature before. Let me know if there's anything else I can do.
Thanks for giving SamHill the credit he deserves. 👍
FYI: You're not the first person to mark their thanks as the solution, and I'm guessing you won't be the last. It's easy to assume that button just marks the discussion as solved (rather than marking a specific reply as the solution).
Best wishes! 😊
