A better way to handle and respond to requests

Asking for features to Steinberg here is not really a good way for us users or Steinberg. It is unclear which ideas are liked and wanted by many users. It is unclear if Steinberg reads the suggestions or not. And it would benefit all to feel confident that the most valuable suggestion are worked on. If neglected we risk people swapping to another DAW while their features actually are beeing worked on behind the scenes.

This could be improoved a lot by either upgrading this forum with a vote system and some status flags to indicate if Steinberg has not read it, is considering it,approved it for development(with or without ETA), or rejected the idea.

Or move the whole feature requesting to an existing development tool like Uservoice, Canny or any other tool that exists.

I totally agree wth this! Studio One has a great way of doing it (by voting), and Reaper, for example, directly interacts with people on the forum with requests. The problem here is the amount of requests and the fact that many people go off on tangents or post more than one thing, plus there’s no interaction at all with Steinberg, and like you said there’s no way to know if anyone is actually reading them.

There should be a mod who oversees the Feature Request forum and keeps people on track, etc.

Thank you.

Usually there is less need for administration when people can vote and that affects the order so the most popular gets up on top. People tend to look at the hottest features and vote before adding a duplicate idea.

+1

It would be great to have some insight into what the developers are thinking in terms of the direction of the product. They have made some improvement with the user surveys, but I think they still have some room to grow in this area. The best companies find ways to interact with their customers and get them engaged in the product.This builds loyalty within the user base.

We come here to share ideas that would make the product better for ourselves, first and foremost, but also hopefully better for other existing and future customers. I know that they monitor the forums because many of the ideas get implemented, but I have to wonder how much better the process could be if the users knew which features were being worked on so that we could give specific feedback on how they would affect our specific workflows (positively or negatively). I realize that coders, in general, might not be the types to interact in a forum environment but a company the size of Steinberg’s should be able to allocate a resource or two to act as liaisons between the developers and forum users.

All you have to do is look at the Wavelab forum and you will see examples of the developer chiming in on various forum topics. I was also part of the Serato Sample beta testing before its initial release and it was so refreshing to have the company representatives comment on the ideas that were submitted and also ask the users to elaborate on their ideas. It made everyone feel like they really cared about giving us the best product possible.

Thanks,

The problem with the forum methodology are multiple.

  1. it is not representative of the user base. Only a very small percentage of the user base uses forums regularly. A much, much, much smaller % utilize vote systems and things like that. It makes the results of any poll non-representative.
  2. Forums are made up of contrarians. This taints the already diluted pool of respondents.

Steinberg has been using surveys recently. But even those are difficult because it’s hard to express any detail to the response. Getting a feature you want in a really poorly implemented way is the same as not getting feature. Yes “we listened to our users” is the claim.

So, it is still best just to make as detailed as possible feature request and include HOW you want it to work. The vast majority of the FRs on this board are useless rambling “you know what mean” type things.

The Borgz are watching :slight_smile:

All good points. Ideally Steinberg would send out emails to all its users for polls, etc. The contrarian factor in forums is a big problem, indeed, as is the way people post on here. And you can see, even with features that are highly useful for everyone (everyday usability things that are not at all specialty features, for example), they often don’t get pushed up and/or get lost in the shuffle.

Yes, you are right. It is probably just a small sample of the user base present here.

It is just an asumption, but I reccon that if the status of feature request system got higher more people would engage. Say if Steinberg committed to pick two, just two features suggested from the user base to implement in the next release. And reward the persons who made the winning proposals and two randomly selected voter for the winning features with just a free upgrade that that next version I bet people would chip in and try and make better suggestions and vote for stuff that they think would have a big chance of winning (which usually is a feature that would benefit a big group of people).

And when the word gets around that Steiny both actually do stuff that is requested and reward commitment I believe that a whole lot more people would follow that “forum” and engage. But as it is now it is only a low percentage of us that think it is fun in itself that engage.



JMCecil are you supporting the status quo in this case? Are you saying that you see no value in this forum in regards to feature requests? You made some valid points in regards to the way some people post here but I got not no indication of how you would suggest to make things better.

I personally don’t accept the argument that because the entire user base isn’t posting in the forum that Steinberg shouldn’t interact with the users that do. After all as the OP alluded to, how many more users would get involved if Steinberg had a presence in the forum? I also mentioned in my earlier post that by knowing what features Steinberg were working on, it would allow us to give specific feedback so that we didn’t end up with as many “almost but not quite” enhancements. Finally, who cares if people disagree. Ultimately, Steinberg is going to decide how they want to implement any new features, but at least they would have feature specific feedback from the users when making those decisions.

Can you imagine what Cubase / Nuendo would look like if it weren’t for all the so-called “contrarians” making suggestions over the years?

I’m saying the current ability to post feature requests is about the only valid way. The problem isn’t the delivery mechanism. The problem is that most of them are not well thought out in terms of the way Cubase works. Half of them are unintelligible. And most of them also look at Cubase from a completely “niche” perspective. Heck, we have an “issues” forum where people are supposed to post repro steps for bugs. Instead it gets overwhelmed with newbie “Cubase Sucks” threads where someone just doesn’t know how to use the software. So basically I’m just saying suggestions like these look good on paper, but don’t work in real life. Again, just go to the Reaper FR and Bug Report forums and check how well it works for software that supposedly has this magic open communications with the devs. It really doesn’t end up working any better.

It is a combination of problems that make it this way. I used to be a part of the Kurzweil beta testers. That was pretty simple. The most comitted users just blurted out what they wanted in a synth. The company responded pretty fast “no that just is not possible”, end of the line, thread locked case closed. Or they responded “We will look into it” thread closed all happy. Then at some times they came back and said. We have developed a beta for feature X, please test it and say what you think. Could not be easier and it was a beauty. No reason why it should not work here. And to make it easier to go through the flood just add a feature in the forum to sort out proposals according to status new/rejected/underreview/accepted/readytotest/completed. It basicly just takes Steiny the time to read the proposals and set a status and lock bad treads. That would also sort out all of threads “CB sucks…”

Again, I totally agree with the OP on this and would love to see a Steinberg presence in the Cubase forum.