Forum Discussion
Storyline under a Microscope: An update from the CTO
Over the past three weeks, the engineering team put Storyline under a microscope. We dug into bugs, dug into our data, and heard a ton of direct feedback to sharpen our interpretation of where thing...
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.
Welcome to the June 2023 “State of Storyline” update. This month I’d like to touch on our application error rate, customer reported issues, and pre-release quality assurance as well as share our progress on creating a 64-bit version of Storyline 360.
Application Error Rate
In Update 76 of Storyline 360 we addressed 12 of the errors most commonly encountered by users. These errors affected areas such as rendering audio waveforms on the timeline, encoding video, and writing files to disk at publish time.
Update 76 was released at the end of May and we’re currently monitoring our error reports as Storyline 360 users adopt the update. It typically takes 4 weeks for a new Storyline 360 version to be adopted widely enough to gather useful insights from this data, so we’ll share the impact these fixes had on our metrics in next month’s update.
Customer Reported Issues
Over the last month we have continued prioritizing bugs affecting 5 or more customer accounts. When last month’s update was published we were tracking 39 such bugs. Update 76 of Storyline 360 addressed 17 of these affecting areas such as text entry word wrapping behavior, hyperlinks in animated text, and importing tables from PowerPoint presentations.
We also addressed several other bugs that did not meet the criteria of impacting 5 or more customer accounts but were clearly still causing customer pain. These bugs affected areas like the new Background Audio feature, the Storyline 360 window failing to restore after being minimized, and the timeline play/pause/stop buttons becoming disabled unpredictably.
As of this writing we are tracking 23 bugs affecting 5 or more customer accounts and remain committed to continuing this work until they are resolved.
Pre-release Quality Assurance
We’ve continued making changes to our test and release cycles in an effort to improve the quality of each Storyline 360 release. This month I want to highlight a couple of areas that we’ve been focusing on recently:
- Release Validation: New versions of Storyline 360 are released on a monthly basis, which means we typically work in 4 week release cycles. In the past, some portion of the Storyline 360 engineering team would spend the last week of each release cycle testing and validating the new version to ensure it’s ready for release. As we’ve taken a critical look at how we approach quality in Storyline it has quickly become clear that having only a portion of the team participate in this release validation effort is not adequate. Starting with Update 76 of Storyline 360 we’ve had the entire team work together on pre-release validation. Having the whole team participate will not only help us catch more issues prior to release, but will also have us working with the application from a customer perspective more frequently. We’ve found that using Storyline in a manner similar to our customers helps us uncover minor bugs and usability issues that don’t tend to get a lot of attention through the normal bug triage and prioritization process.
- Test Automation: We employ a suite of automated tests to continuously validate the stability of the Storyline 360 application. Some of these tests only exercise one specific component of Storyline in isolation, while others run the full application and simulate a user performing common operations. These tests have replaced some of the repetitive manual testing that traditionally had to be done by a person. We’ve recently begun an effort to expand this test suite to better cover the Storyline 360 HTML5 Player application. With such a wide variety of devices, operating systems, and web browsers in use today, ensuring that the HTML5 Player continues to work with all of them can be a time consuming process for us to do manually. We are working to leverage modern testing frameworks and platforms to automate as much of this work as possible so that we can focus on more valuable tasks like reviewing customer bug reports, investigating frequently occurring errors, and finding new ways to improve the product.
64-bit Storyline 360
Over the past month we’ve kicked off the initial engineering work on a 64-bit version of Storyline 360. We’ve completed some of the initial infrastructure work to allow us to build and test a 64-bit version of Storyline 360 internally. We’ve also begun addressing some of the 32-bit third party components that will need to be updated, replaced, or removed.
Storyline 360 uses a Chromium-based web browser component for functionality like in-app preview, the 360° image editor, and publishing to video. We’ve successfully created a 64-bit version of this component and are working to integrate it into the 64-bit Storyline build.
We have also identified several different strategies for addressing other third party components that enable functionality like screen recording, spell check, and PowerPoint import. We will begin evaluating and implementing these strategies in the coming weeks.
Looking Forward
To close out this month’s update I’d like to share a couple of additional items:
- Storyline Quality Survey: We recently sent out a survey to some of our most prolific Storyline 360 users to gather feedback on the application’s overall quality. As responses to the survey come in we’ve been reviewing them to find common themes and direct our future efforts to improve and expand the product. I want to express our appreciation for anyone who received the survey and took the time to respond. If you were not among the Storyline 360 users who received an invitation to complete the survey but are interested in participating you can find and complete the survey here: Storyline Quality Survey. We will be following up with respondents in the coming weeks to discuss their specific feedback.
- Storyline 360 Private Beta: I would once again like to extend an invitation to join our private beta program. The beta version of Storyline 360 is updated on a weekly basis and gets new features and bug fixes before the public version. Participants in this program can report bugs or provide feedback directly to the Storyline 360 engineering team. The beta version can also be installed side-by-side with the public one so you don't have to choose one or the other. If you’re interested in participating please e-mail beta@articulate.com and we’ll get you added to the program!
