Better release notes.

Sperson

I would love to see some better release notes published with new features.

It feels like for those of us that frequently follow the forums this could be an opportunity to generate excitement for new features and gather feedback on new release MVPs from the early adopters.

There have been several seemingly big releases recently that could have benefited from better release information to generate excitement and user interest. Two that come to mind are haptics connect and shared playlists.

With haptics connect there was a lot of how to use it, but nothing on why the user should care and how it differed from existing handy setup. Etc. I saw all the posts but wondered if I was missing something.

With playlist sharing it felt like the opposite, there were forum buildups but when it was released it felt like it was thrown over the wall with a “here’s a new feature, good luck” and no documentation on how it works, where to find it or how to use it. I’ve seen countless forum posts asking where to find the playlists or how to search (I still can’t find the one I made public in DeoVR).

What I’m looking for as a user is:

Start with why. Why do I, as a user, care about this awesome new feature that you spent tons of dev time working on and prioritized above everything else.
Instructions: please, please give us some instructions for use (with annotated screenshots that show us where to find the feature and how to use it (especially if it differs between applications (web, DeoVR, and SLR app)
where is this being release (web, DeoVR, and SLR app) and if only a partial release can we expect full release in coming timeframe, and is this a full feature set or is this iterative, and what features are still coming.
Additional information about the feature release that you would like us to know, or feedback that you may be looking for.

I’m asking for this because I see so many feature requests asked in this community then when something is released it’s a quick “feature released” message instead of celebrating the release of a community request with the effort put in by product, devs, designers, and qa to make this feature possible for your engaged user community.

doublevr

Sperson thx for a heads up.
We have in immediate plans to better elaborate on release logs.
Ultimately we are looking to get a dedicated person for such communication. It's well over due for us to start documenting all the app functionality. It's really hard to get the right people

ibins

It seems to me what you want is a software documentation, rather than release notes.

Nothing wrong with that, but that is, or at least should be an entirely different thing. Release notes should be short and to the point but not an alternative for a proper documentation.

You also only read release notes from the last or at most the last few releases, while features still might be relevant in some years.

So any new user would miss out a lot if you hide this stuff in release notes instead of doing a proper documentation, that everyone who uses the software for the first time can read and follow.

Sperson

ibins sure, let’s call it consistent release documentation then.

Release notes don’t have to be short or short lived. My product has a published archive of 10 years of monthly release notes for our software. It gives the user a searchable timeline of changes in the software as it was iterated on. Yes software may change over the years but if the notes are consistent detailed and searchable then it captures a history of those feature changes.

At the very least a feature release should have some key details like the problem, the solution, and the call to action. I personally like the press release format in the Amazon working backward framework.

In my opinion this is one of the best release threads in the forum. https://forum.sexlikereal.com/d/1872-big-search-function-update-in-web-search
It showed the problem, the solution, and how to use it.

Unfortunately these release posts are scattered about the forum and inconsistent at best with no consistent way of knowing which platform (web, DeoVR, or SLR app) are affected by these changes or persistent location for feature documentation and let’s face it on tight deadlines docs is one of the first things to get cut. So it’s up to the PM to make sure the end user knows how to use the new feature and until that is in a persistent help location that is maintained as changes are made, a few steps and screenshots in the release notes would be better than nothing, otherwise adoption may remain low and potentially successful features may languish instead of thrive.

In the end all I would love to see is some form of consistency, letting me (the user) know why I should care, and providing me some place to figure out how/where I can use the feature.

Sperson

doublevr I totally agree documenting apps is a challenge, then maintaining them as the iterations change the UI is just as big of a challenge. (I’ve spent the last few weeks auditing that in my app for our docs team)

Not to mention that you have to basically maintain multiple versions of your docs for each platform.

Starting out with a release doc template and pinning a closed thread with each of the feature releases would be a huge step in that direction though.

spacepirate

doublevr see heresphere release notes for good examples of what they should look like. every change that could affect a user is mentioned. deovr release notes are really short and either make no mention of certain changes or simply say "bug fixes" without any detail on what was fixed.