I’ve been following the recent discussion on the white-labeling function and some hot points about pricing has emerged. Taking the whole situation into perspective, I wonder, why doesn’t Webflow staff follow a policy of discussing new features and new pricing structure with its community?
A lot of unnecessary emotions and additional work on readjustments could be saved if the community could have its say before a major change. I really do not understand what is holding Webflow back from such a policy - just lack of insight into the value of this or some fear (e.g. why feed the competition with information in advance)?
I’m kind fo strongly not in favor of that. It’s going to bring noise, a lot of noise, and a discussion that will be at best quite far from what users need. Lot’s of reasons.
Webflow users are not forum users. I don’t know the figures but at best we’re here only representing a tiny portion.
people who are satisfied rarely voice it, people who are not do it. Also people who are busy working do it less than people who are less busy.
new features don’t appear magically. There are tests, beta test, and I for one know that Webflow dev team often reach out to some users, out of the blue, for feedback about possible ways to do things. So it happens, just not publicly on the forum.
Webflow knows its target audience better than us here on the forum. Because users reach out first on support@webflow.com than here (I assume).
We’re all SO different. Here, there are a lot of people I don’t even understand how they do a design business when they say $10 hosting id too expensive of they wouldn’t use Creative Cloud because how dare they rent a software. On another point of view, those people may think I’m super rich and have tremendous overpaid business because I’m always defending Webflow of Adobe’s plans. (and as for this, I’m not rich)
features asked by users here, including me, are one thing, and solutions brought by Webflow are another—better—thing. For example I asked for a way to not display all the collections for content editors, and they came up with the new option dropdown, which solves my problem but in a way that’s 100 times better. And this happens every time. They see the big picture of their product and business, and we don’t.
All in all, aren’t they listening? They’ve halved the price of the hosting following users voicing their concerns. I wasn’t expected that at all.
I wasn’t capable of imagining Webflow before it happened. I wasn’t capable of imagining the CMS part before I saw it. If Webflow listens for users prior to finalize features, within a year we have Wordpress with a better live editor.
For the sake of brevity, I won’t elaborate at length but mention just a couple of points:
Receiving feedback does not equal gIib action upon it. User feedback
is nearly always noise and this is just natural. This does not make
it obsolete. It is the marketer’s job to make sense out of it. I
am not stating anywhere that Webflow should mindlessly do what users
say.
I am not stating that Webflow should announce their of work on a new
feature from its very start (even though I would encourage this too,
if implemented properly). I am proposing that Webflow open for
feedback nearly complete work. My rationale are the recent
heated debates about pricing. Yes, Webflow did listen after
introducing the CMS. But was all that boiling point of emotion
and anxiety among users necessary? (I guess it had been no less
emotion and anxiety for Webflow, as well). It all could have
gone smooth if there had been some preliminary discussion on
the planned changes.
If “who does this” was the important question… we would have never had Webflow on the first place. “You propose full-range design without code? But who does this? People use Wordpress. Obviously no need of such a Webflow thingy…”
I agree that posting an open forum creates a lot of noise, wherever it may be, but one way of getting feedback that I’ve seen work successfully on a website I use frequently (not web-design related) would be to have a pin-board where submitted ideas are posted… people simply give a thumbs up or a thumbs down, and web flow can see the tally of popular options and decide whether to implement them or not.
A thumb up or down does not explain what specifically one would like or not in a proposed change. Neither does it explain why. Voting does not bring value in this context.
The whole point of extracting feedback from the community for Webflow should be to uncover perspectives which have remained hidden from their sight, to get help in the form of community-suggested solutions and to get insights and inspiration for their own solutions.
I already pointed out that there’s nothing wrong with noise. If we were to cut off noise we should not have this forum at all, as well.
I thought it was odd that they advertised 3D Transitioning coming soon on facebook, but I couldn’t find any mention of it here. Now reading what @vincent said… makes a little more sense I guess, but still disappointing (as a paying user).