End of Year 2018

[PVA - Admin]

This may very well have felt like the fastest year so far. Splitting up the Design Summit from release made for two much smoother separate events but it definitely felt like doing release twice.

 

The year end is also where i like to do a yearly comparison to the last few years and beyond, you can see so much clearer of a picture with YEARS of analytics data vs a few months after you start collecting it. I wanted to share some metrics with you all, since I'm nerdy and love analyzing these sorts of things:

 

Adoption Rate:

This chart included the entire installed user base (all countries), split apart by version shown as a percentage. This is the clearest way of seeing how many users are still on older versions, as well as determining the adoption rate for the latest version. There are three points circled on the one below, these are the dates where the newest version of Vectorworks overtook the prior version as the most widely used.

 

For the last two versions, the overtake occurred around the same time, the very end of February and start of March. Prior years this took even longer. However, this year, we reached this point on the 16th of December, a whole 2.5 months early. 

This tells us two things:

1. Users are updating faster than in previous years on average. This is fantastic news.
2. We are more obligated than ever to improve the quality of our initial release. Users are less and less inclined to wait for service packs, opting more frequently to get the latest and greatest as soon as possible. We have multiple new efforts underway to accomplish this.

 

Posts:

There are more and more conversations, of increasing complexity happening on the forum every day. Our quietest month this year for instance, was busier than the busiest month ever prior to 2016.

  
(The big spike around Sept 2016 is the introduction of the new Forum)

 

This is also excellent news. The more users that see the content of this forum, the larger a percentage of our user base has the most up to date information and the quickest access to answers. The more threads we start here and the more discussions we have, the more answers are added to our ever growing database of knowledge, and the larger our Google presence when someone is looking for help via normal search making it easier to find info that way as well.

Lots of projects that have been long awaiting approval have been given the green light, and many that were green lit long ago are going to go public in the coming months. We have some excellent stuff planned for this upcoming year, a big portion of it you'll likely see even in the first half of the year if things go as planned. 

I am proud of what I have contributed to these results. I am hopeful for the future that I will be able to impact things even more positively, and bring even better tools and information to everyone here. A Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and a very Happy New Year to you all!

[jnr]

Jim:

 

If not for you, things like earlier overtake would not happen. I worry that they will promote you 🙂 ! While I know I can be less than pleasant on here sometimes, its always borne of frustration with the software not working as advertised. I appreciate your patience and willingness to try to help. You are an enormous asset to the company (it was a different world in message board land before you showed up).  I will say one thing that may be buried in the message board data is that to be honest, 2019 has been a very frustrating release for many (Mojave not helping) and I wonder if the uptick in traffic is directly attributable to that. That said, your efforts to reign in instability and things like the stair tool from hell are very much appreciated. I'm optimistic that this is going to get better and that we can all look forward to less beta testing :). Enjoy your time off!

 

-Jim

[PVA - Admin]

We're all back this week! so if I or anyone else missed anything posted over the holidays, please feel free to either bump the related thread or simply link me to them and I'll get things handled.

 

[M5d]

Does your graph indicate the percentage of users actually using the latest release, or just the download numbers? 

 

And isn't it possible, as jnr already pointed out, that your influence had something to do with those download numbers as well? 

 

The context for this year's release was the narrative you used to introduce it. I know my own reaction to the introduction –– "Our teams here at Vectorworks, Inc. paid close attention to the wishlist requests and other forum communications this year, and we heard you loud and clear - you want improvements to the quality, speed, and usability of the software . . ." –– was one of great enthusiasm, it "genuinely" had me considering an early jump as well. This statement seemed both definitive and indicative of major changes in Q.A. and approach, "loud and clear" it said!

 

Now the narrative, with hindsight and the release period over, is that you're telling yourselves at N.A., in a post telling us, that "users are less and less inclined to wait" and that this means you are "more obligated than ever to improve the quality of initial releases" with "multiple new efforts underway". 

 

What I believe we (users) are actually "inclined" to do, is follow our previous experiences until, of course, we're presented with a reason to reconsider, which is most likely what is shown in your numbers. We were given a story of genuine change and, in your voice, it was genuinely embraced as genuine. 😏 But the irony of this rather odd-looking loop of cause, effect and post hoc analysis Jim, is it seems to expose that the rhetoric about quality was just that, rhetoric, and now, it seems, a little more rhetoric was necessary to mop up the last lot. 

 

I'm curious as to why this may have occurred and wonder if that's not shown on your graph too? Because the other thing the data appears to show is a 6 to 7% decline in the number of users who bothered to install the previous version at all.

 

 

 

 

Nevertheless, action = confidence; it would probably help if, instead of nebulous statements like "loud and clear" or "more obligated than ever", we had detail on what the "multiple new efforts" actually are? And help if we knew why it is you now think the Q.A. resources and actions, if any, implied to have taken place for the 2019 release fell short in hindsight?

 

 

 

Edited January 5, 2019 by M5d