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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

I once spent a week working on a fairly complex feature for a product that the users were demanding almost daily updates on. I delivered it and, by coincidence, happened to be where the users were a couple of weeks later and I stopped by to say hello and saw that the user who had been asking for the feature every day was still using the product the "old way". I asked why and he didn't seem to follow what I meant, so I reached over and showed him the feature that he had been demanding I add and he said, "oh, wow, that's awesome, that's going to be such a huge timesaver for us!"

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This is why changelogs and release notes are not optional or tucked away in a dark corner. And users who request features need to be notified (actively, specifically) that something they requested or a bug they hit was resolved or addressed.

I know, that's a lot of work. But what's the point of fixing things if you never tell someone it's fixed.

We've sent release notes our for a while but no one ever read them. Now we do showcases of the feature so people have no choice but to see what new features are coming.

changelogs and release notes don't get read. unless you're sending personal emails to the users who requested the feature, the experience in the essay here is the only way: make it automatic or turned on by default.

and if it's not good enough to be automatic or enabled by default, then keep iterating until it is.

Changelogs are for developers, not users.

They're a bad way to communicate specifics because they're literally a long list of changes, most of which are boring/irrelevant to most people.

If you're releasing new features you need more ceremony. Maybe an email with targeted specifics, or at least a section on your website which highlights big important new features.

That's great advice, but it's untrue that nobody reads changelogs.

I read them religiously for software I'm passionate about as a user, and when I solo'd a product for a decade I was regularly surprised how familiar some of my customers were with mine (most often when they had dedicated IT resources or were similarly small boutique outfits themselves). I've also managed large, custom enterprise projects where subject matter experts on the other end relied on them (in addition to other channels of communication).

What drives me nuts is how some companies decided to water them down. e.g. Windows Update's long list of "security related update" where you have to google KB's to find out what they are, and another company that just always puts in "various fixes and improvements".

I've started collecting screenshots of app updates that are simply "bug fixes and performance improvements" because it's such a joke at this point. What bugs? How much performance improvement? Did you also nuke one of my favorite features while you were at it, or require other actions of me that I wasn't intending to perform? Who knows? Guess I'll roll the dice once again...

When I read release notes like that I immediately assume malice. I don't believe that the information is not available or that the devs are too lazy to bullet point _at least_ the major changes or vulnerabilities fixed. I think this is generally an excuse to slip in tracking/etc without resistance.

Nah, it seems more likely that the mgmt. saw the list of bugs and said "don't admit to those!" and the performance improvements ... " Don't say we used to use a stupid O(n^3) algorithm!

From my experience, it's probably tens of bugs where each of them happened to less than 0.01% of customers, and requires a overly detailed explanation for anyone who didn't have first-hand experience with it.

yeah, it looks like windows is the virus

I wish software did something more like video games. Well-designed video games will notice that there's a skill you're not using when you should be and show hints on-screen about using it, e.g. press L1 to change weapons, R2 to take cover.

I’m not so sure. It’s mildly irritating getting numerous pop ups of “hey, look over here at this thing we added” even when permanently dismissible. Tracking a user and letting them know that we know they haven’t ever used feature X is likely to just give them the creeps. In video games you are in “play” mode, and very aware you’re being tracked, judged, awarded points etc. In software that’s often less clear and (from certain behemoths) deliberately so. You’re also likely trying to achieve a task, rather than have fun. I personally would find it irritating if not downright invasive if I hadn’t explicitly agreed to something clearer and more explicit than a cookie warning.

The wonders of digital transformation. One of my biggest insights here was that digital transformation is not only the technical upgrade or simplicity of implementation but rather the cultural implementation i.e., process re-development and re-training.

The main things getting transformed in “digital transformation” are the people.

You did the customer success role.

How subtle was the update message letting the users know about the new feature?

Yeah sounds like the lesson here is that nobody reads the update messages.

Couldn't have anything to do with how app update screens share the exact ergonomics that subscribe-to-the-newsletter nags and other ad popups have.

If quantum scientists thought the slit experiment was exciting, they should study IT user preferences and be amazed how depending on the mode of communication/observation, customers will both scrutinize every letter you write while simultaneously not reading it at all, will know every wrong pixel of your UI but not know where the button for "Thing" (labeled "Thing") is, and how anything you make is somehow the best worst average thing they've ever seen.

If you're ever user facing it's a harsh but quick lesson that you can't really count on any users to follow any real pattern. Different persons latch onto different things, with adamant proponents and opponents of everything with a huge swatch of grey shades in-between. At a certain point you just need to decide when the "grey" is no longer grey for you on a particular subject and start to optimize for the part that cares while checking why the grey part isn't as interested.

A lot of conversations with clients I have are with those in the grey territory, where they don't quite know what they want but they know they want it. Often times, they're more looking for a reference architecture and something to compare their current processes/workflows to, and this usually is pretty simple to work with. Those that are proponents of a feature N are typically vocal and picky, but the feedback tends to be pretty good and the guidance is clear on how they envision it, since there's a clear workflow on their side a lot of times that they want to optimize. Opponents of feature N typically bring out the edge cases and demand a solution, and are equally, if not more vocal than the proponents.

It's really a tricky thing, and it's never really clear which is going to be "best" for users/the dev team.

This comment made my day.

Users not knowing what they want but knowing that they want it is a useful phrase.

It is a special case of Morningstar's law, you can't tell people anything. http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...

I mean, they stopped demanding the feature every day. Clearly they were aware that something changed.

Not at all.

The PM or whatever nag got the answer he wanted, and was able to check the box.

Nobody was yelling at anyone to actually use it.

I've had something similar happen to me, and quickly learned not to assume that your customer POC will effectively relay information to the end users in their organization. They were pinging us constantly about a new feature because it was on their list of things to ask about. Once we told them it was done, they crossed it off their list and we never heard about it again until months later discovered by a chance interaction that none of the product users in the organization even knew we had added the feature.

To clarify, was he not aware that the new feature had already been released? Or did he think the "old way" was the new feature (and that he'd simply been blocked before), thus suggesting that the urgency of his ticket was unnecessary?

Well, I definitely told them that the feature they had asked for had been finished.

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