How happy are we with feature request and bug handling at Articulate?

Thanks for the update Kerry. Look forward to seeing these changes in action and also good to feel listened to.

Hey Team,

We put Storyline under a microscope based on your feedback and are making a number of changes to focus on quality first, transparency, and proactive communication. I appreciate all the feedback you shared and for giving me the opportunity to dive in and learn.

Please take a look at my update here about what we discovered and what we are changing. We'll be making monthly updates on the State of Storyline to keep you up to date. 

With deep appreciation,
Kerry.

Hey Community members,

I just want to inform you all that we’ve deleted all of Matthew Bibby’s posts at his request and in line with our community guidelines. I am saddened that he no longer wishes to be a part of the community.

I appreciate all of your feedback and hear your frustrations. We are committed to doing better and I want to partner with all of you to make that happen. I am grateful for the opportunity to work with you all.

Kerry

Hey Matt, Understood. I didn't mean to imply I was asking for consulting. I thought you'd like to be included in the conversation for transparency but I understand I was wrong.

Thank you for the impact you had on a lot of the accessibility work the team did last year. Your feedback helped. 

Matthew,

Man, why don't you tell us how you really feel? Instead of beating around the bush? (Or whatever the appropriate idiom is.) :)

Wow. Tumbleweeds even? Got it. Rolling up my sleeves and getting to work!

Thanks for the ideas Sam. We’ve got multiple talented crews of engineers working on Storyline and we are committed to its success.

I like your idea of including feature requests and bug reports in your profile, plus adding feature upvotes. But today that would mean diverting engineers from working on the feature requests and bug fixes that help the community build courses. So we’re not prioritizing that at this time. More community features will be planned for the second half of the year so we should be able to give guidance then (instead of unhelpful vague platitudes).

The feedback I hear though is you are looking for more transparency on what’s coming, what’s not working, how we prioritize, and want to make sure we don’t have just one engineer working alone in a cave with no friends deciding on random things to work on. Got it.

By the way, the video seems to be private.

Here is to head banging together in 2023. Looking forward to meeting you.

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.

Kerry,

You can't hardly be surprised that a message thread like this has started, much less drawn the amount of traffic from as many hard-core users of the tool as it has. A brief tour through Discuss > Articulate Storyline will yield many more examples of the topic of this thread. What IS surprising is there aren't MORE of these threads, either here or off-site.

Canned responses from Articulate's mouthpieces followed by...absolutely nothing...sooner or later tend to catch up with you. The standoffish attitude I have seen harkens back to the days of Adobe long before they bought their way into the eLearning development toolspace by swallowing up Macromedia. As a beta tester for Macromedia for a LONG time, and a charter member of the Authorware Inner Circle (a curated group of power users from outside the organization who contributed, skunkworks-style, to the NEXT version of Authorware) it was obvious how much Macromedia was invested in not only in gathering user feedback, but APPLYING that feedback to the product line, at a time well before company-hosted, web-based user communities. From the early-90s through the mid-2000s, there was no other game in town with the depth and breadth of Macromedia. It is thanks to their licensing Flash that you were even able to get your product off the ground. If more Macromedians and less Adobe-ians were running the show now, Storyline may well have never gotten the market position it has now.

Here's my wish. i wish that whoever makes priority decisions for what gets coded would be forced to go through this forum, and read every post from the release of SL2 until today. Place every post in one of two categories: "How can I do ...?" and "This no longer works or doesn't work as it says it should". Leave out the feature requests entirely. You will find that before SL3, the vast majority of requests were for "How can I do this?" Since, the vast majority are for "This doesn't work (any more)." I think that should point the way very clearly to where coder's time should be focused. Once the app works, features can be added. I recognize that there are a lot of requests for features that are far more difficult to implement than they are worth, or if implemented can benefit only a small niche.