Smugmug State of the Union...

David Evertsen · September 15, 2016

So these DGrin pages have been pretty quiet, things have been rolling along.. I understand Smugmug staff saved photos from another companies demize and got them on here after lots and lots of work..

With all that said, I see FB posts about all sorts of general Photography topics from SM and the like, any suggestions about upgrades get sent to UserVoice which we all know is worthless.. Heck these DGRIN pages don't get much traction anymore.. If you don't think Uservoice is lost we still can't print a Price list of all my offerings for my Business Account.. How is that still not possible among many other things??

I would like to hear a state of Smugmug from the Principals of the Company who aren't really active on the web anymore from what I can tell.. What are we working towards helping all those hard working photogs that pay for Business accounts.. Talk to us and let us know..

From the hard working Professionals tell everyone on here or anyone that is left what do you need Smugmug to do for you to help your business.. Or if you really think it is time to move on from what they offer??

Thanks for your time,

leftquark · September 15, 2016

Hi David,
You have a "principal of the company" active on the forums every single day: SmugMugs Director of Product is your very own DGrin admin and a customer of 9 years who does many of the same things you're trying to do. I'm more than happy to discuss what I can, but I'm also not about to repeat past mistakes of announcing we're close to releasing something, only to find we have to delay it considerably due to outside circumstances, refactoring or changes in priority.

We monitor UserVoice very closely and use the data it provides from your votes to help my team prioritize items. But just because an idea exists on UserVoice or has a large number of votes doesn't mean we're going to build every single item on there. We'd love to do that but with 3,000 ideas we can't do them all and if we tried, we'd have a mess of a product. The Product team has a great Roadmap planned out and the entire company is hard at work building these products to help solve the problems that people come to us hoping to solve.

We have projects planned that will benefit everyone: from our basic accounts to our Business accounts alike. We can't ignore any one group and the reason why SmugMug has survived 14 years while the majority of photography websites have gone under is because we try to build products that the entire SmugMug community can use. By building tools that everyone can use it might feel like we aren't focusing on you, but I can assure you that we are hard at work buildings things that even you will love (in fact, I'm hoping to announce something this week that I think will make you happy). We are hard at work building many of the things you and the rest of the community are asking for and we're going to make sure they're products that you'll love and not just features we've rushed out the door to say we built it.

I always love collecting feedback and I'm more than happy to have you and other Pros list your priorities here. But I will also caveat that and remind you that the DGrin community is a very small but very vocal section of the entire SmugMug community and the Product team has a number of avenues that we pull from when we determine what projects we're going to work on.

I can't discuss in detail the projects we're working on because I want us to be around for many many years to come but I will tell you that our focus is on making it super easy to get your photos to SmugMug and to build a beautiful photo site. We also have a team hard at work on commerce features. About half of the product team runs a photo business through their SmugMug site and I'll assure you that there's no way we can forget about you guys/gals.

Besides being able to export pricelists, what can we do to help your business?

David Evertsen · September 15, 2016

leftquark wrote: »

Hi David,
You have a "principal of the company" active on the forums every single day: SmugMugs Director of Product is your very own DGrin admin and a customer of 9 years who does many of the same things you're trying to do. I'm more than happy to discuss what I can, but I'm also not about to repeat past mistakes of announcing we're close to releasing something, only to find we have to delay it considerably due to outside circumstances, refactoring or changes in priority.

We monitor UserVoice very closely and use the data it provides from your votes to help my team prioritize items. But just because an idea exists on UserVoice or has a large number of votes doesn't mean we're going to build every single item on there. We'd love to do that but with 3,000 ideas we can't do them all and if we tried, we'd have a mess of a product. The Product team has a great Roadmap planned out and the entire company is hard at work building these products to help solve the problems that people come to us hoping to solve.

We have projects planned that will benefit everyone: from our basic accounts to our Business accounts alike. We can't ignore any one group and the reason why SmugMug has survived 14 years while the majority of photography websites have gone under is because we try to build products that the entire SmugMug community can use. By building tools that everyone can use it might feel like we aren't focusing on you, but I can assure you that we are hard at work buildings things that even you will love (in fact, I'm hoping to announce something this week that I think will make you happy). We are hard at work building many of the things you and the rest of the community are asking for and we're going to make sure they're products that you'll love and not just features we've rushed out the door to say we built it.

I always love collecting feedback and I'm more than happy to have you and other Pros list your priorities here. But I will also caveat that and remind you that the DGrin community is a very small but very vocal section of the entire SmugMug community and the Product team has a number of avenues that we pull from when we determine what projects we're going to work on.

I can't discuss in detail the projects we're working on because I want us to be around for many many years to come but I will tell you that our focus is on making it super easy to get your photos to SmugMug and to build a beautiful photo site. We also have a team hard at work on commerce features. About half of the product team runs a photo business through their SmugMug site and I'll assure you that there's no way we can forget about you guys/gals.

Besides being able to export pricelists, what can we do to help your business?

Fix creating Smart Galleries, since the conversion to the new Smumug the amount of clicks I have to go through has doubled at least to create one. I create on average about 200 every fall for Football and quit doing it for some teams because it takes so long to do so.. Then when you are doing it the Autofill feature changes my input randomly depending on what I type it.. Causing images not to show up.. Let's streamline the process let it be done in one box or something.. Click Fatigue is real and it is tiring..

iPhone cases are another.. I could sell a ton..

Thanks,

Cygnus Studios · September 15, 2016

leftquark wrote: »

You have a "principal of the company" active on the forums every single day: SmugMugs Director of Product is your very own DGrin admin and a customer of 9 years who does many of the same things you're trying to do. I'm more than happy to discuss what I can, but I'm also not about to repeat past mistakes of announcing we're close to releasing something, only to find we have to delay it considerably due to outside circumstances, refactoring or changes in priority.

I agree with David, things are a lot more quiet than they used to be in years past. The number of smugmug staff talking and sharing has diminished quite a bit. I remember very well quite a few who were active here.

I also realize that things get prioritized and held back or scrapped for a variety of reasons. Announcing things did create issues in the past. I remember some of those past mistakes well

On top of that you have all the legal garbage and protecting ideas that every business has to put up with, but there are times where we the customer feel like we're not part of the process anymore.

A little more discussion beforehand might cause less knee jerk reactions on the back end. I think most people would agree that the changes have been for the better, but there are so many threads where something stupid has popped up that blindsided us. Not that they were bad changes, but we didn't know our sites or how we share images would change and that is what causes those outcries from us.

Maybe it is more perception than reality, but at some point, perception becomes reality.

leftquark · September 15, 2016

Cygnus Studios wrote: »

The number of smugmug staff talking and sharing has diminished quite a bit. I remember very well quite a few who were active here.

Besides Baldy, is there anyone else that you'd like to hear from?

Cygnus Studios wrote: »

There are times where we the customer feel like we're not part of the process anymore. A little more discussion beforehand might cause less knee jerk reactions on the back end.

I've been doing my best to get feedback where I can and I've been asking these questions in the Product News forum. You'll see I did that with Cover Image and we got some great feedback that we were able to incorporate before releasing the feature (and we're continuing to iterate on ... i know, it's missing the ability to reposition the cover image). I've also been running some polls and other surveys to help us build the tools and involve you where we can. I'll also be starting a sort of Beta Tester program (it'll have a different name) soon, where we'll get a bunch of you screenshots and early access to things in the pipeline so we can get early feedback. You'll see an announcement asking for volunteers in a future newsletter (probably not until October at the earliest).

We also monitor UserVoice very closely and each week a different PM is on duty to moderate and respond to all the comments and suggestions. I'm currently working with the UserVoice team to improve its ability to have discussions on there, since it's a bit difficult right now to respond to customers and have conversations about the requests.

leftquark · September 16, 2016

I know David already saw this, but I think we have an announcement that you'll be happy about: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=2044199

Here's a sneak peak of what we released (look at the bottom of the image):

Ferguson · September 19, 2016

leftquark wrote: »

We monitor UserVoice very closely and use the data it provides from your votes to help my team prioritize items. But just because an idea exists on UserVoice or has a large number of votes doesn't mean we're going to build every single item on there.

I think for good or ill, the vast majority of us who have been around a while feel like it is completely pointless to vote or enter things there. I am not sure what would be best, but if you really want participation there, you have to do something to actually demonstrate the attention you say it gets.

As a simple example, I looked at "Top ideas" and the top couple screens have no status from smugmug. I notice you purposely have all dates omitted, but I think some of those have been there for years and years, at least from vague memory.

I couldn't see how to get an accurate count; it says 133 pages and at a guess 15 each is about 2000 entries at a guess. Less than half that many have status. Maybe one thing you could do is more rapidly give feedback ESPECIALLY negative feedback. Frankly I would rather see a "no" or "not now" than just silence, as it demonstrates engagement. Only 16 have indications they are actively being considered.

For example... if you have a roadmap that includes 100 of these items, and do not want to share timelines, maybe you could arrange them in tiers - "soon", "mid-term", "later", "Hell with a mild chill in the air", etc.

Or maybe you do not want to give any hints as to when -- but you MUST have an idea that about half the remaining will just never get done. I've run help desks, where people just accumulate bug reports and change requests and file them away knowing they will never get done -- it just makes the group look silly, frankly. It seems counter-intuitive, but I think people with entries would rather just be told "no" or "not any time soon" than have them sit around looking like maybe tomorrow it will get attention -- maybe if it gets a few more votes. And for those who might come vote -- it makes the American election almost seem like your vote matters, in comparison.

Until there seems to be a visible effect, not just words, I think you will have less actual participation there than you might want.

-0-0-0-0-0-

Related to other notes, Left Quark, we appreciate your participation here. But after some very active participation, having Baldy disappear entirely is also bad optics, much as the UserVoice lack of status is.

leftquark · September 19, 2016

Ferguson wrote: »

I think for good or ill, the vast majority of us who have been around a while feel like it is completely pointless to vote or enter things there.

As a simple example, I looked at "Top ideas" and the top couple screens have no status from smugmug.

Maybe one thing you could do is more rapidly give feedback ESPECIALLY negative feedback. Frankly I would rather see a "no" or "not now" than just silence,

A good Product team builds features that solves the problems for a large number of its customers. Good Product teams avoid building features that only a small number of loud customers ask for. SmugMug has an amazing team of Product Managers, Designers, and Engineers, so most of the ideas on the Feedback Forums (UserVoice) aren't new to us. Additionally, with thousands of ideas, it's completely unfeasible for us to build every feature requested, or even a good portion of them. SmugMug would be totally unusable!

We use the Feedback Forums to help give us an indication of how many of our customers have a certain problem that we could potentially fix. "When" a suggestion was placed has very little weight. The data from the votes gives us a sampling of what problems are important to solve and how important are they for us to solve. We use those numbers to help us to determine priorities and what projects we're going to work on.

Any type of Feature Request forum is going to be a lose-lose situation for the company (SmugMug). There's a reason why a number of extremely successful tech companies just flat out don't take customer feedback for features. We've thought long and hard about what to do with the Feedback Forums and how we're using it today is what we feel is the best way to get the data we're trying to collect from it. I do wish that UserVoice did a better job of allowing us to interact with you and drill into the problems, and I'm working with the UserVoice team to make it better to hold conversations with the supports of those ideas.

The problem is that any kind of feedback biases the way people will vote. We've tried to limit those biases where we can: by removing timestamps (so that people don't think "this idea has been open for forever, so I won't vote for it, even though I really want to), by surfacing hot ideas instead of ones with the most votes (to surface a greater variety of ideas), etc. We even created new responses like "Not at This Time" to try to help provide more feedback, but they all carried more consequences then help. When I started labeling items as "Not at This Time", customers stopped voting for the idea. I want customers to let us know how badly they want a feature, and they do that by voting. If they're not voting because a status has swayed them, we lose the valuable data that we wanted to collect!

The Feedback Forums are monitored very closely by the Product team. Every new comment and suggestion is manually approved by a weekly rotation on the team. Ideas are usually approved within 24 hours (often as quick as an hour) and the entire team sees every comment and suggestion when they come in. We often respond when we can, though UserVoice doesn't do a very good job of surfacing our "comments" (they only surface our official responses).

I'm open to additional suggestions, but we've already found that engaging by providing more status responses to an idea as to the timing of it, doesn't work.

Ferguson wrote: »

I couldn't see how to get an accurate count; it says 133 pages and at a guess 15 each is about 2000 entries at a guess.

As of 4:27pm PT on Sept 19, 2016, there are 2,765 active open ideas on the Feedback Forums. While there are some duplicate ideas, we've done our best to merge the ones that we've find.

Ferguson wrote: »

For example... if you have a roadmap that includes 100 of these items, and do not want to share timelines, maybe you could arrange them in tiers - "soon", "mid-term", "later", "Hell with a mild chill in the air", etc. Or maybe you do not want to give any hints as to when -- but you MUST have an idea that about half the remaining will just never get done.

Giving false hope is worse than saying nothing. I don't want to say "soon" and then have something come up that causes us to delay the project, which happens. Additionally, we can't give away our Roadmap or SmugMug will disappear, something we don't want to do. I am more inclined, however, to mark items as "In Progress" once they get far enough into test. While a few of you on DGrin have are understanding, we've found that the majority of SmugMug customers would prefer we say nothing over not meeting our estimate.

With that said, I will say one thing "soon". Soon we'll be launching a "Beta Tester Program" of sorts. For those in the program we'll provide early access to screenshots, features, and discussions on how we should build our new features. We want to include a variety of SmugMug customers as we build features to make sure we're really nailing your problems. Stay tuned.

Ferguson wrote: »

after some very active participation, having Baldy disappear entirely is also bad optics, much as the UserVoice lack of status is.

Though we love Baldy dearly, about 6 months ago he decided he wanted to explore a new project and his role at SmugMug has greatly diminished. SmugMug is truly a "family company", and his family is still heavily involved (our CEO/Co-Founder, our VP of Operations, one of our Product Managers, and our Countess of Cash are all related). We're excited to see what Baldy builds but he won't be posting on DGrin on SmugMug's behalf. As SmugMug's Director of Product, I'm also the right person to be interfacing as our prioritization and customer feedback loop ultimately comes in and gets determined by the Product Team.

We're working on some amazing things and I'm excited to release them to you when we know that they're in a lovable state (just look, in my 3 month tenure we've released 2 of David's biggest asks: mobile web apps and Phone Cases)!

(P.S: I dare you to find me a company whose Director of Product reads through as many posts and responds in the length above ^^^. Here at SmugMug I'm encouraged and expected to have this kind of involvement!)

Cygnus Studios · September 20, 2016

leftquark wrote: »

A good Product team builds features that solves the problems for a large number of its customers.

We use the Feedback Forums to help give us an indication of how many of our customers have a certain problem that we could potentially fix.

I do wish that UserVoice did a better job of allowing us to interact with you and drill into the problems, and I'm working with the UserVoice team to make it better to hold conversations with the supports of those ideas.

I'm open to additional suggestions, but we've already found that engaging by providing more status responses to an idea as to the timing of it, doesn't work.

You are right of course, but finding a balance between what it used to be with announcements and the feeling of not knowing what is happening is what is needed. I wish that I knew the magic balance, but currently it feels like we are in the dark more often than not.

leftquark wrote: »

Giving false hope is worse than saying nothing. I don't want to say "soon" and then have something come up that causes us to delay the project, which happens. Additionally, we can't give away our Roadmap or SmugMug will disappear, something we don't want to do.

I remember well those days when we were told something was coming and it either didn't come as soon as we wanted or at all. I do not wish to go back to those days.

leftquark wrote: »

With that said, I will say one thing "soon". Soon we'll be launching a "Beta Tester Program" of sorts. For those in the program we'll provide early access to screenshots, features, and discussions on how we should build our new features. We want to include a variety of SmugMug customers as we build features to make sure we're really nailing your problems. Stay tuned.

Now this sounds very promising. I'm hoping the implementation works. In the past, smugmug has teamed up with photographers for things that didn't always work out well. Not that it is smugmug's fault in all cases, but I have hope for this beta program.

leftquark wrote: »

Though we love Baldy dearly, about 6 months ago he decided he wanted to explore a new project and his role at SmugMug has greatly diminished.

Besides Baldy, is there anyone else that you'd like to hear from?

There has been some changes at smugmug over the past few years, so who we should hear from isn't an easy answer. Of course it was great when Baldy was around and posting on a somewhat regular basis, but there were others who were active here on the forums.

After the whole smugs thing, I had a bad taste in my mouth and kind of gave up on who was coming and going at smugmug so I have no recommendation on who should be engaging with us.

I appreciate your efforts in bringing us what you can, and your desire to improve the communication, but there is that nagging feeling that something is missing in the process.

I personally do not know who is left to talk to us. I wish that I did.

David Evertsen · September 22, 2016

Leftquark,

Thanks for your reply and updates, many of us on here don't know who is who other than Baldy and a few that have been around since the early days. I have talked at length on the phone with Baldy about Smugmug as well as others at the company. I completely understand the need to keep future direction quiet to a point, especially when there is a Federal Court House in East Texas that is all about Patent Trolls..

I have in the past been told things were going to be done and never happened. Mainly related to the pricelists revamp years ago.. I have never received an email from SMUGMUG saying that one of my labs was having a special so I could pass the savings on to my customers. I heard that over and over as one of the reasons for the Pricing Revamp. No worries. Smart Galleries are huge to me and way to time consuming to do but, I do it to sell more images, with the SM 2.0 is takes more clicks to do so than the old one.. Would love to help on Beta for that..

Thanks for listening,

Ferguson · September 22, 2016

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

leftquark wrote: »

I'm open to additional suggestions, but we've already found that engaging by providing more status responses to an idea as to the timing of it, doesn't work.

I don't have a good idea, but I agree with your lose-lose comment to some extent. When someone new goes there, what they see makes sense, and what you get from them is what you want (most likely).

However, I think after a period of time it is fundamentally discouraging to go there and have the PERCEPTION that it is just a dumping ground for ideas that never go anywhere, a place to send people much as most technical support organizations start with "reboot, then reinstall all the software, then reinstall windows and then all the software again, then call us back if you have that much endurance".

Please do not think I am saying you intend that; I am saying it is easy to get that impression.

I do have an off the wall thought as I write this:

Stop showing people what other people suggest, period. Make it a write-only suggestion box. You guys sort and group them internally. Send an 95% form letter response back (as you sort into categories you may be able to change it slightly especially for things in progress). I think it is the presence of so many high voted ideas (whether you want those or not) that is disheartening.

Besides, I'm not sure what you want is "oh, I would like that too, good idea" so much as "I am stuck and I need X". Put a bit of a bar so people have to do more than just +1 someone else's idea.

Give over a quota each year -- 1 suggestion for Basic, two for Power, 3 for Portfolio, 4 for Business.

Tell everyone up front you are not sharing the totals and why.

On some periodic basis (6-12 months?) take a bucket of similar requests, and send everyone who asked a note that is germane to that request. Doesn't have to be a commitment, but maybe "this is on hold until we can get the X done then we will pay more attention to it", might just be "not really on our radar, does not seem to be a lot of interest" or really anything that shows it is not just a form letter without relevance.

Just thinking out loud.

please don't say "put that suggestion on user voice".

leftquark · September 23, 2016

Great idea - could you put that suggestion on UserVoice? :P

:beatwax :deadhorse :rambo :s85

Actually, that's how a lot of companies do it and one avenue we've been discussing (though haven't made any decisions yet).

Ferguson · September 24, 2016

It is nice to deal with a company who not only has, but allows employees to exercise, a sense of humor. Seriously.

Smugmug State of the Union...

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