Newbies are here :-)
Just an observation that it seems a big majority of the people in this community is a group of heterogeneous people with very little understanding on drones from the past. I am one of those and still taking my baby steps with my first ever drone - MINI (btw, is here anybody who doesn't have MINI?).
This rapidly growing amount of people seem to have lots of questions, and some of those are "better" than some, and some seems also repetative.
This type of user group for sure is a challenge for a startup like DroneLink. Because we ask many questions, this is a burden for you. But if you succeed in listening to this growing group, there are lots of business opportunities also.
I and also some other users have wished to have a good, written documentation, which I think you have already on your to-do list. You have this excellent 101 video series, but it doesn't answer many of the things that is difficult for a newbie because you might think is self explanatory and therefore don't need further instructions.
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9 comments
Tero -
Fair questions and we appreciate the sympathy.
The majority of our new users ARE mini users.. We do have users (particularly from our Enterprise and Pro users) who are using higher end drones.
I like the idea of having a simplified ABC document for newbies. I realize that a 45 video series can seem overwhelming - especially since you really can get flying in 5-10 minutes (if you accept the fact that you're not understanding all the details and terminology of what makes DL unique. We will consider.
I had another request that I really liked which was to create an "index" of the videos that lists all the key things so people could easily find the video (and time within the video) where certain topics are covered. I was going to offer a free subscription to someone for doing it - would be great for a new user who is going through all the videos anyway.
I'm going to post that and see if I get any takers.
Every new request sounds great by itself. The real trick is the order / priority. For example, if I ask the average user, which would you have first:
Which do you think will win?
Written documentation
Eric has been posting a bunch of surveys to Facebook. Maybe we need to post one in a location that is accessible to more of our users so we can get a better sample size.
The link I've been posting around to the FB pages was to the same survey - so it's the same sample size.
I did a separate survey on Youtube where I limited it so you could only respond to one.
I didn't include documentation on that list as I think it's different than a feature. (full disclosure I could do the documentation, need JIm and the dev team to do anything on the feature functionality side.
I'm trying to see if I can get a new user to volunteer to help with the documentation or index in trade for a free account. If that doesn't work, I'll get it on my list of things to do.
"Eric has been posting a bunch of surveys to Facebook. Maybe we need to post one in a location that is accessible to more of our users so we can get a better sample size."
I agree 100%. You are visible in many social media sites, but at least I feel this page is your "home page". Does this platform support these kind of surveys?
I just checked out the Trello:
https://trello.com/b/vCBI4lQS/product-roadmap
You have there lists of features, either on an proposal level, or already implemented. Never even heard of Trello before. Was this the place you would like to have opened all the new ideas from your users? Can I see anywhere the whole list of features added in DroneLink since the first version of DroneLink was born? How do I see what these implemented tickets, e.g. 'Camera video caption' includes? I now see there only the headline and status (done).
Regarding the priority. I see that this for sure is totally up to you. Only you can estimate the work hours per every new feature/wish. E.g. if this very much wanted FollowMe took 400h man hours, it probably would make more sense to make other high priority tickets 4-5 with the same effort.
And to your question about priority. Like James, I would give my vote for a good written documentation :-)
And Eric - Thanks for taking into account my 'index' proposal and all the efforts implementing that.
It is true that documentation on the user interface and such will require less of my time (not zero) in terms of contribution. But there is a whole other set of written documentation that needs to be created for the software development teams of our enterprise customers, which only I can do. If only it were that simple.
Ya, I know just wishful thinking. It's doesn't hurt to let feature settle down.
Perhaps it could be a community project.
My first thought now was to set up collaborative documentation, for example in a form like Wikiweb. Because many insights from other users can be a great enrichment. The whole thing is optimized with decisive tags.
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