the thing is, most commercial products are deconnected from reality because they do not have public issue trackers like e.g. github
Sometimes it’s because it’s a small product and the dev has a specific vision, but more generally it’s because the PMs want to lead flash so they get hierarchy visibility and the devs either have to work on what the PM says or want to work on fun stuff, which user feedback drudgery often is not (not to mention you first need to trawl through it in order to evaluate and classify it)
Just look at discord for instance (because it infuriates me), their zendesk is full of stuff which is broken or requests for more polish / improvements to recent features (like making threads more useful).
What were their most recent releases? Fucking Party Mode. And breaking notifications (I assume due to the Highlights beta). And whatever the fuck “land-io” is.
Meanwhile there’s still no way to rebind or disable the application’s built-in shortcut, in a gamer-oriented program.
Github’s “feedback” repo is a similar graveyard.
So if you have multiple USB controllers, the assigned button number on every single one of them will send the toggle mute signal.
Meanwhile we get the Party mode like you mentioned; cute typing games with overlays telling us how many key presses we managed to string together without pause..
However, there are lots factors which cause this issue, partially repeating the previous things:
- devs want to work on fun / sexy stuff
- or they want backend work and there’s a lack of staff on the client side (because the hardcoded shortcuts or the random beeping are entirely client-side issues)
- PMs want to design new whizbang stuff they can wank themselves over or add to their portfolio or whatever, triaging and fixing papercuts and usability bugs is not sexy unless an n+x hit them and tells you to get them fixed, this is even more of an issue if development is PM/manager-driven and deviating is risky
- you may not want to put your finger in that trap if that tags you as the person who fixes the shit bug, doing it once in a while can be nice / interesting / rewarding, doing it all the time less so
- discord is a social network (or at least social-network-adjacent), meaning they probably have a lot of staff involved in mitigating abuse (spam, scams, fraud, …)
- discord has received a lot of investment (500m last year), I don’t know how their cashflow is but the issue of investment is growth chasing, chasing network effects is more useful than fixing minor usability bugs here and I doubt anyone’ll leave discord over random beeps
I've heard numerous times developers saying that they'd gladly fix some annoyances in {{megacorp product}} but product managers couldn't care less to allow spending time on those.
I think they have the capability to improve their product, but they have become too reliant on what casual users want. Crowdsourcing isn’t a replacement for product management.
Isn't that the fate of all software as it grows big? Optimize for the casual users, leave the power users in the dirt. Companies keep forgetting that casual users eventually become power users on the most expensive plan, if you give them the freedom to do so.
No, most users never use it and just forget to cancel and those are the most profitable users to have. Just like for gym memberships.
This is what happens with popular software.
In the same sense gyms do not only contain machines being used by everyone, there are overlapping subsets people use.
The feature equivalent of Pareto's principle or something.