Why NI doesn’t listen to users.

To be honest it seems hard to get what users want.

I read the share ideas threads sometimes and a lot of posts are a bit... well... not on point, to be polite.

Plus it feels a bit useless since threads are now 10 pages now and are a mess.

NI follows a very convoluted way to give the feeling they are doing something while doing very few.

I guess it will work for a couple of years since users are stuck with hardware and software. But it's a dangerous path

Using 'highest votes, highest priority', everyone wins except those who proposed or voted for lower voted features and don't care about the higher voted ones.

I'm not saying this to completely dismiss the idea – it can be useful for getting ideas to consider. But it is easy to lose sight of good ideas that for whatever reason do not get a lot of votes. I did two rounds of Ableton Live beta testing and saw many good ideas not make it in because they were knocked down the 'recent suggestions' list before they could gather enough votes. That's not to say they would have anyway, but a large number of ideas did not get the chance to be seen by more than a handful of people. I was initially checking in every day, reading every new suggestion, and eventually could not keep up because I could not spend that time every day. Most people aren't reading beyond the first page or two. It also only includes people aware that this voting option exists, so it needs to be publicised and encourage as many users as possible to vote. It will obviously work better for a smaller user base.

It also has the danger of ideas being implemented which benefit some users while getting in the way of a smooth workflow for others, because it isn't a good method for considering the general impact of a design choice (I'm particularly remembering an idea I asked Ableton to think about carefully which benefits people who use only one sample per track but is a negative for people who use more than one. They did it anyway. My follow-on suggestion to improve it – not revert it but make it work for everyone – was subsequently ignored).

What I'm saying is that it's bad to rely too much on this mechanism. Broader market research, observation of how existing users use the software, and internal idea generation, all of this is needed. You can add 'user voted' feature suggestions to this, if you ensure that it's not resulting in 'those who shout loudest' controlling the direction of development and properly consider everyone who did not vote for a feature. Consider this forum. Who do you think would be driving all the new features? Those who are able to be here every day, or those who may only be able to log on a couple of times a week for a short time?

I never even use clips (?)