Forum Discussion
How happy are we with feature request and bug handling at Articulate?
Hi Kerry, good to see an Articulate rep on this thread.
As others have mentioned, this isn't a new problem and something we've been dealing with for years. I had a look through the forums recently just to look through examples of the frustrations I was feeling to make sure I wasn't alone. Nope, this has been going on for a long time. I've joked in the past that I think Articulate have one developer working on Storyline. It really does feel like that. I saw your email and am keen to meet and talk through some of the frustrations we feel with our interactions with support, such as the stock standard "That's a great suggestion, we recommend submitting a feature request". People stop doing that when they don't feel they are being listened to. Whether this is the case or not, it always feels that feature requests and bug reports are not publicly available for a reason. It means the users have less power to hold Articulate accountable.
For example, I can submit bug reports and feature requests and as an account holder, I have no record of those, other than an email response. In my account, I should be able to view the feature requests and bug reports I've submitted.
It would be to see publicly feature requests, so that users can give them an upvote, This is all done via the forums at the moment with people just chiming in with a "+1". It would be great to see some of these things make it in to the roadmap too.
Also, recognised bugs need to be available publicly listed so we don't waste time in the forums and can first review if a big has been acknowledged and when a patch is likely to be released so we can communicate this to clients.
I put a tongue in cheek video together recently to entertain myself and also illustrate a common experience on the forums. I hope you can appreciate the funny side to this, but also the bang your head against the table frustration too.
Look forward to catching up.
Sam, Thanks for the video. I really enjoyed it and the music.
I too have come to the conclusion that requests for "features" are a waste of time because they're ignored.
As far as bugs go, I get emails every time someone posts to the forum. Whenever a bug is mentioned/acknowledged by multiple people including SL staff, I drag it to a separate Outlook folder (SL Bugs) so I can find it again.
One pet peeve of mine is when SL asks to take the issue offline. Other users no longer learn whether a bug was confirmed, or not.
At my company we never update to the latest release (always has too many bugs) and often wait 6 months or more to upgrade when the software is hopefully more stable.
It's sad but that advice is sound and most professional companies i worked for or with advice that too.
Nevertheless i am inclined to give both Articulate and Kerry the benefit of the doubt and let us see if they can improve on it.
I would be happy with 1 upgrade per half year or year if it was 100% bugfree and new features would be really properly tested and indeed improvements.I understand the sound reason to take offline so that the communication can be more efficient and direct, but I think Maura is talking more about the loss of transparency for everybody else tracking the same issue. I think taking out of the forum is fine, as long as people can still a) find out whether the issue is a bug, and b) track the progress of a fix if it is a bug. We are frequently in a position where we cannot communicate this to our clients. If we're frustrated, our clients are frustrated too. We just need to have a certain level of trust that issues are looked at in a timely manner.
Absolutely. The various ancient "/solved" web forum entries from half a decade ago are sometimes the most valuable source for almost any PC problems. Documenting past problems and solutions is extremely helpful for future use.
An archive for old entries might be a good solution.
