As many of us long term Windows Phone users are aware, Microsoft has a "User Voice" feature suggestion page where users can create feature suggestions and assign votes to suggestions based on how badly they want the features. This is a great idea, and it's a very interesting way for Microsoft to get a feel for which of the requests coming in truly are highly demanded, versus which of them are only of interest to a select few people.
This has been around for quite a while now. Unfortunately, it just isn't working. Progress against this list is simply glacial. Please understand, I get that MS has put a lot of work into essentially re-implementing the Windows Phone code into the NT kernel. I actually really appreciate this and believe it was a very important goal for them, and will have lots and lots of long term benefits to the users, by giving us a much more similar codebase to Windows 8. Unfortunately, this major shift is essentially considered as a "neutral" or even "negative" for the current users. They really just replaced the features we already had with features that were recoded but look identical, and sometimes are not even as functional (as with Music).
What Windows Phone really needs in my opinion is for MS to go through and bang out a ton of these small issues that result in frustrating users experiences and "I can't believe this is not in here" comments from new users. They need to dedicate a large block of time and just try to work through all the niggling issues that drive people nuts.
There are two issues with the Feature Suggestion page as I see it:
(1) Nobody seems to be combining like suggestions, thus skewing the results by splitting votes for the same feature across multiple suggestions. Just look up "orientation lock" (one of my biggest pet peeves)... you will find six or seven suggestions asking for the same thing, all with votes attached. Often times you will also find the same suggestion split by OS, for example "orientation lock in WP8" and "orientation lock in WP7.5". Obviously, this makes no sense... they aren't going to go back and implement features and minor fixes in older versions. There needs to be some maintenance to merge all these into the same suggestion.
(2) There seems to be no value placed on how difficult the suggestion is to implement. There are many, many things in Windows Phone that are completely missing, and are quite shocking when comparing to Android or iOS. These are small, simple features, as well as many small bugs. These would be VERY quick to implement... they are not "I can't live without this" features (and thus do not get many votes), but the sum of the whole creates an unfavorable impression of Windows Phone and a feeling of it being "unfinished". People move from the other OS and find these small things, one by one, that don't work correctly or are completely missing. And they start to question whether the move to WP was a smart idea.
My personal list of these small annoyances includes, but is not limited to:
- No global orientation lock (simplest thing in the universe to implement)
- No call duration in call history (again, MAJOR simplicity here and really important for those of us that bill time by the hour)
- Video cannot play anthropomorphically encoded videos properly, and stretches them vertically (very easy to fix but the bug has been there since the first release rendering some people's video libraries almost unwatchable without re-encoding)
I think MS should have a developer team review as many of these suggestions as possible and just clear out all the small ones and fix all the minor bugs. These are not major things that take a lot of resources, like a Notification Center. They should be easy to clear away and take comparatively low resources. Microsoft can then say "we have made over 1,000 quality improvements and satisfied feature requests in this new release!"
This would make a MUCH stronger platform, and provide a lot of polish that it currently lacks and I feel is really hurting it with users. It would also go a long way towards making the user base feel like Microsoft actually does care. Right now these suggestions are posted and then drop into the abyss.
This has been around for quite a while now. Unfortunately, it just isn't working. Progress against this list is simply glacial. Please understand, I get that MS has put a lot of work into essentially re-implementing the Windows Phone code into the NT kernel. I actually really appreciate this and believe it was a very important goal for them, and will have lots and lots of long term benefits to the users, by giving us a much more similar codebase to Windows 8. Unfortunately, this major shift is essentially considered as a "neutral" or even "negative" for the current users. They really just replaced the features we already had with features that were recoded but look identical, and sometimes are not even as functional (as with Music).
What Windows Phone really needs in my opinion is for MS to go through and bang out a ton of these small issues that result in frustrating users experiences and "I can't believe this is not in here" comments from new users. They need to dedicate a large block of time and just try to work through all the niggling issues that drive people nuts.
There are two issues with the Feature Suggestion page as I see it:
(1) Nobody seems to be combining like suggestions, thus skewing the results by splitting votes for the same feature across multiple suggestions. Just look up "orientation lock" (one of my biggest pet peeves)... you will find six or seven suggestions asking for the same thing, all with votes attached. Often times you will also find the same suggestion split by OS, for example "orientation lock in WP8" and "orientation lock in WP7.5". Obviously, this makes no sense... they aren't going to go back and implement features and minor fixes in older versions. There needs to be some maintenance to merge all these into the same suggestion.
(2) There seems to be no value placed on how difficult the suggestion is to implement. There are many, many things in Windows Phone that are completely missing, and are quite shocking when comparing to Android or iOS. These are small, simple features, as well as many small bugs. These would be VERY quick to implement... they are not "I can't live without this" features (and thus do not get many votes), but the sum of the whole creates an unfavorable impression of Windows Phone and a feeling of it being "unfinished". People move from the other OS and find these small things, one by one, that don't work correctly or are completely missing. And they start to question whether the move to WP was a smart idea.
My personal list of these small annoyances includes, but is not limited to:
- No global orientation lock (simplest thing in the universe to implement)
- No call duration in call history (again, MAJOR simplicity here and really important for those of us that bill time by the hour)
- Video cannot play anthropomorphically encoded videos properly, and stretches them vertically (very easy to fix but the bug has been there since the first release rendering some people's video libraries almost unwatchable without re-encoding)
I think MS should have a developer team review as many of these suggestions as possible and just clear out all the small ones and fix all the minor bugs. These are not major things that take a lot of resources, like a Notification Center. They should be easy to clear away and take comparatively low resources. Microsoft can then say "we have made over 1,000 quality improvements and satisfied feature requests in this new release!"
This would make a MUCH stronger platform, and provide a lot of polish that it currently lacks and I feel is really hurting it with users. It would also go a long way towards making the user base feel like Microsoft actually does care. Right now these suggestions are posted and then drop into the abyss.
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