End User Survey

Man-o-man that would be super valuable feedback for the App Admins to be able to access too.

I also suggest that you identify who is doing the Survey.  ie the Company management? Or the App Admin? or Quick Base itself (I know the answer, but the user won't) . 

Users may say that the Dashboard is terrible or perhaps they in fact have a constructive suggestion on what other links or search boxes or reports they need, and expect that feedback to be heard by the App Admin when in fact its sort of going into a black statistical hole at Quick Base if the App Admins cannot access it.

Yeah, sharing this feedback out with app admins is something I've been thinking over. Can't commit to it being on the roadmap yet, but we'll see. It's mainly a question of how much infrastructure we'd need to build out to share that data appropriately.

Sam Jones
QuickBase Product Manager
 

OK, well also consider the wording to clarify who is doing the Survey.  That is just words, not infrastructure.

>Man-o-man that would be super valuable ...

It would be easy enough to use some simple script to throw up a jQueryUI dialog box and solicit feedback and save the results to a table. The only real issue is how often you want to collect feedback and on what pages.

As long as this we can opt our, sure. I don't want that popping up for our C-level customers. At all. Ever.

I also agree to the posts above that suggest the feedback should be available to the app admins.

Honestly, though - I don't see this as a successful approach to eliciting valuable user feedback that will help drive product improvements. What you're rating is less QB and more the ability of the app admins / developers to build things - which is delicate because there are some areas in which QB is severely limited and it hurts the overall user experience. If you read the discussion forum you see hints of the same themes over and over. "How do I?" "Can we?" For every one of those there's either an implied UX challenge ("how do we make that more obvious?" - ex: setting a field to use a pick list,  report link fields, modifying reference fields in relationships, etc.) or a possible product enhancement ("yeah - maybe we need something like that" - ex: regex support in formulas, reports as members of the toolbar [I'd so love that...], distinct results in reports, formula fields in section/tab titles, etc.). All of that impacts our ability to deliver a quality UX - but users won't know that. They're not rating QB. They're rating the app admins / developers.

Maybe you should consider surveying the app admins / developers? We have a pretty good handle on things we hear from users and think would be valuable additions to the product.

Yes - I know the user voice submission and voting process is there. To me that just seems like a parking lot and not an effective way to manage the feedback process.

You guys are doing great work improving with these incremental monthly updates. Let us help you with that. We know our pain points and many times they result in user challenges. Sometimes ones we can't fix right now.

I agree with this point:

What you're rating is less QB and more the ability of the app admins / developers to build things.

Not necessarily because we are limited in our ability by Quick Base limitations,  but often users don't have an easy channel to get to their Quick Base Admin, so they suffer with a bad report or dashboard because they don't understand how easy it is to make an improvement if they push a bit to get attention.   I just had a call with some front line admin staff at a client because the owner told me "make them happier" and I just added some fields to forms and reports for them and they were happier.

Sam,
I think you should pause for a moment, and let the responses to this announcement roll in.  So far there are not a lot of responses to this announcement.  I think that shows that this may not be the best way to notify your customers of this survey.
I get a lot of emails about Empower, and see notices about monthly updates.  I am very pleased so see the work being done to update Quickbase and hope to see more notices in the future. Using these other methods of communication like the email this morning are a better way for this notice. 

I don?t believe you are approaching this from a customer?s perspective. 
What you are proposing is contacting our staff, our corporate partners? staff, and contractors of both for this survey. Another commented about problems with C-Suite customers and suggests a means of opting out. There is something worse than a complaint from the C-Suite - having them pass along a compliant from our partners C-Suite.   Opt-out is not enough. It should be Opt-in. 

What I am really talking about is the relationship between Quickbase and its customers. We would most certainly expect the simple courtesy of receiving the results of the survey.  More  to the point , from our perspective our staff, partners etc. may be users of the Quickbase service but in our case and perhaps in many other cases your customer is something different. Let this be an opportunity to learn more about your customers and how they are different from users. 

This is a large part of what we're trying to measure. We want to understand what app builder behaviors make things hard for end users, as well as what Quick Base as a platform does to make things hard for end users. 

The way I see it is even if the user is frustrated by the choices made by their app builder, Quick Base should be working to empower both the app builder to build a better app, and the user to customize their experience, so both are more productive.

My job is fundamentally to make it easier to build a great app and harder to build a bad app.


Sam Jones
QuickBase Product Manager
 

Richard,
Thanks for your concern.
We've emailed all app administrators today, and haven't kicked anything off yet. Customers who'd like to have their users excluded can have their realm administrator open a support request. 


Sam Jones
QuickBase Product Manager
 

Mark,
Based on your feedback, I changed the heading: