[✔️ DONE] "Home" and "End" buttons don't work + Deep discussion about quality, traction, features, life and death

Hah, this annoys me all the time, but I just didn’t bother to report it. Would love to see this fixed!

Hi!
Could you please share your OC and browser? Gif/small video would help a lot to see how is it going, reproduce, and fix!

(thanks in advance :sparkling_heart:)

Windows 10 and Google Chrome (latest) here. I’ll try to record a video next time I see it (it’s not hard to reproduce, but I’m short on time at the moment).

Polina, here is a .gif:

Screen Recording 2020-10-29 at 11.06.34 PM.gif

After I typed the word “education” and the cursor is blinking, I am typing on my keyboard the “home” button repeatedly, as I want to capitalize the letter “E,” but the cursor won’t move.

Hope that’s what you’re looking for!

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Many thanks for the explanation and gif!
The bug is created, but no eta for fix (backlog is too big for now :disappointed_relieved:) .

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When are you going to hire those 10 new programmers? :stuck_out_tongue:

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Yes, this is a really annoyance and it would be great if Fibery could address this and many other idiosyncrasies with Text formatting (such as you can’t write a URL when creating an Entity inline, etc.) if it expects to become primetime. I expect we will get more and more volume of distraught users asking for these fixes, because many of these items - and I’ll name another: the fact that notifications tag you 2x if you are @mentioned in some instances - are not going to be tolerated by a certain group of paying customers to whom this just seems amateurish. I really hope the team can realize this, do a sweep of these annoyances and knock them out, and then be able to confidently back up this statement from the recent blog post re: April:

I am not 100% sure your thoughts @Matt_Blais, but I’m guessing you may be with me in agreeing that the above cannot be said to be accomplished until some stuff, like the issue we are discussing in this thread, which was last addressed about 6 months ago, is solved! I don’t think you need ANY new developers to fix these things, just some focus, and conviction towards making a polished product. Since in the blog post I’m quoting above there is a declaration to “polish existing things,” I’d love to see the team follow-through on that!

Cheers!

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Yes, I took that quote from the recent April update to mean exactly what you are saying. So hopefully that is correct and we do see stuff like this :arrow_up: addressed in the next few months.

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Just a shame we got no response to this from any official person at Fibery and among yourself, @Matt_Blais, and me, we have added quite a bit of activity to this post…

Indeed - a handful of minor but noticeable UI issues gives the impression of “Not Ready for Prime Time” :confused:

Unfortunately some people will be immediately scared off by such an experience, believing that it reflects a deeper problem within the product team: perhaps a lack of resources necessary to make continued progress, or an impending flame-out.

The glitchy UI experience is like looking at a new car that you plan to own for 12+ years, and immediately you see a handful of “minor” cosmetic issues and problems, so you think “what else is wrong that I can’t see?”, and “perhaps the manufacturer is in trouble; will they honor their warranty?” “Do they care about Quality?”

@mdubakov – to buy into a system like Fibery is a huge personal & corporate investment of time and energy, as it’s impossible to replace easily if it doesn’t work out. So there needs to be a LOT of confidence in the product and its future in order to validate such a decision. “Little” UI issues can have an outsized impact on one’s impression of the product, even if unwarranted.

Plus, many like myself plan to include many “non technical” users, so ease of use and learning is paramount; thus UI consistency –both within the product, and consistency with UI norms and conventions– is supremely important. UI consistency issues have a huge impact on how frustrating a product is to learn, and how quickly it can be learned and used. I think this is more important than big features.

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I agree with you both, but I remain hopeful that my interpretation of the April progress update is correct. Thus far I see no reason to doubt it, though certainly I wish @mdubakov would chime in here to confirm whether that’s the case.

@Oshyan @B_Sp Indeed Fibery is not polished now and there are many rough edges. And as I mentioned in April’s post we are aware of that and going to spend more time on polishing and small fixes. Prioritization is always hard. What is more important, this bug or full-text search? This bug or document sharing? To be honest I don’t feel that Fibery THAT buggy and is not ready for production usage, but it is not polished for sure. That will be changed soon

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@Matt_Blais, this is one of the most eloquently written posts I’ve seen! Not just the part I highlighted above, but the entirety of it! Thanks! You have done a good job conveying my concerns much better than I am able to myself :).

I appreciate the chime in from @mdubakov below, but I will just add to this comment:

that unfortunately this is not the experience of my team. Aside from myself, the Fibery evangelist, most of my team, and like Matt I’ll be bringing in more non-technical types, mostly reacts to the bugginess of Fibery, not the positive. I realize that as the Product Creator this might be something you don’t want to hear, but it’s the reality of teams like my own. And I strongly believe larger teams that are used to tools with fewer quirks/bugs will have a similar reaction as mine. I think @Matt_Blais is one of the newer users who appreciates Fibery’s benefit but is also feeling this. Just today, for example, I was pasting an image in a comment, hitting “cmd” + “v” to do so, and the comment got committed, instead of the image pasting in. This made me wonder was that because the “cmd” button was used, which is also a way to commit the comment via Keyboard shortcut. Either way, this is an odd, annoying behavior…Not to mention the Notifications pane disappearing if you click out of an entity that you got to when you clicked the previous notification, etc. etc.

I appreciate we need big features too, like full text search. But I think the Fibery team has to find a way to solve all of this at once, whatever it takes. It is hard to use the tool on a daily basis, month over month, dealing with the quirks and bugs which make quality of life low at times, yet stay 100% committed to Fibery. I really urge the team to find a way to prioritize these issues whatever it takes.

The above is so true!

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I agree that Fibery is not “THAT buggy” — but this misses the point, which is that even a few very “minor” UI issues/bugs can have a huge impact on user experience/impression, especially for new users.

For better or worse, Apple has raised our expectations that everything should always be completely smooth and glitch-free, so now everything is measured against that standard!

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I agree with this but I have an alternate point/theory/perspective to propose. I don’t think a lack of polish alone is a major reason for lack of adoption, etc. Why? Because I have many of the same or similar frustrations with other tools like ClickUp and Notion (some of which you yourself have mentioned as well). Perhaps the prime example is Roam which has often felt fragile to me at times, with tons of quirks around page auto-complete order ranking, weird formatting stuff, and all kinds of other BS. And yet it is massively successful, so far at least. Likewise Notion and ClickUp, the latter of which I think gets these quirky or unpolished behaviors because it moves so fast in product update and release in general, it’s essentially inevitable.

So the point I want to make is not that your concerns aren’t valid and shouldn’t be addressed, rather I think that Fibery is in a unique position where, unlike Notion it doesn’t have the blocks/dashboard hook, or the blocks/outlining/transclusion/references magic of Roam, and unlike ClickUp it isn’t as immediately intuitive, thus it has the well-known-to-us (and Fibery team) difficulty of communicating its actual value and power to overcome already. Then you add in a lack of polish and quirkiness in some areas, and it’s sort of a one-two punch that may significantly hurt adoption. I just wanted to make this point because I think it can be frustrating to see that other tools still succeed despite being very “quirky”, buggy, hacky, etc.

I might actually say this, too: solving the problem of the initial learning curve (and/or finding product market fit) is hard. Hopefully do-able with a combination of docs/training and ongoing improvements to the system, tools, defaults, etc. but it’s not a short-term fix, nor one where you can likely predict the “end”. It’s true that polishing things also probably has no end, at least since other changes keep being made and features keep being added (that themselves need polish), but adding polish is at least a more understandable and somewhat quantifiable thing where progress can be clearly made. It involves a lot less trial and error, user research, etc. than trying to improve onboarding and ease of use, I think. So it seems like a key area where improvements in user retention could be made. That said if retention is not really a major issue, polish is not going to help with reaching new customers in the first place…

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Appreciate the commentary here. I will just add that in my opinion, the tools you mentioned in that quote all are a lot less quirky/buggy than Fibery, that’s the opinion of my team, too. Let me give you another example. Today I was typing in an entity and hitting the “end” key, and the cursor goes to the second-to-the-last character in the word at the end of the line. That is just odd. When I decided to type, it moved to the end of the word. There are examples of this galore I’m sorry to say, I don’t have the time to make a list, and don’t think I should have to. In this regard, Notion is tops and I am sure they have many faithful users who appreciate the polish of it - granted, not Apple-esque as @Matt_Blais points out! ClickUp and Roam equally do not have near the amount of formatting/typing issues as Fibery in my opinion, while also hardly flaw-free. We could debate this a long time I suppose, but the amount of odd formatting with Fibery in particular is well more than I have dealt with in anything else I’ve tried.

We don’t have enough people in the community here “complaining” about lack of polish/bugs etc. for these issues to be proven in their value or not. But then again, we have 369 users period, not a huge amount - I really wish we could get Fibery adopted to more teams! I just believe, like Matt, that these things need to be addressed pretty desperately. In fact, and it seems you disagree, I think Fibery will lose out to the Notions, Roams, ClickUps, not to mention Asanas, Codas, etc. when people start to use Fibery and run across these quirks at every turn - because for now they are that prominent! - and get turned off quickly.

Thanks again for the commentary, this is all great stuff!

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Perhaps they are now, but that wasn’t always the case, and yet their user adoption at some of those points was still very good. They all had an easy (or easier) hook. Roam, in particular, is (or at least was) to put it indelicately a trash fire of weird quirks as recently as 6 months ago. They’ve improved things, to be sure, just don’t right-click and try to use any of those options and expect intuitive results…

Anyway, I think we’ve missed each other on this one because…

Odd, that’s not at all what I meant, actually. I was saying that Fibery is more likely to lose out because it has the dual handicaps of being new/different (conceptually challenging) and it has a lack of polish in some everyday areas. What I was trying to suggest is that addressing the former is important, but is long-term and it’s unclear exactly how to do it, while addressing the latter (polish) is a lot more tangible and more progress can be made in a short time with some focus, even though it’s unglamorous.

So to put it another way, I think long-term user retention and satisfaction could be improved most immediately with some polish (though I don’t know the actual rate of abandonment to say whether this is worth the focus).

Michael has already said they’re going to be working on this though, so hopefully soon many of these frustrations will be addressed. For now, patience, right? :smiley:

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Ok great, thanks for all that and the clear discourse (no pun intended :laughing:), you are a real master of this forum!

For myself, and potentially colleague @Matt_Blais, patience is a problem as working hours in Fibery a day, which I am now doing, as are most of my team, these quirks are borderline debilitating. For example the one I just mentioned with the odd behavior of the cursor when typing. I’m not exactly feeling confident, sorry, when we have not a lot of detail on many of these things getting fixed, and in reality the quote in the blog post was ended with “bs bingo.” How confident do you really feel the team is going to take this stuff seriously? I am glad for a lot of feature releases like action buttons and impending Automations, huge stuff, but I’d like more detail on what “polish” really means. There are a host of these funny issues kicking around this forum without much attention by the Fibery team. I develop software so it makes me wonder what is taking so long to fix this particular issue with the home/end button, it shouldn’t be that hard, unless what Matt is fearing about some underlying issue with architecture is indeed the case. When Polina says the “backlog is too big” is this of all the quirks, etc. we talk about in here a lot?

Anyway, thanks again for the usual wise words!

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From my experience @Oshyan points are spot on. Indeed rough edges can turn people away, but they are here for something special that do provide unique value that overweights the problems. Roam is a good example, since UI-wise it has many rough edges, but the value (connected blocks of thoughts) is just huge so you can live with other quirky things. To be honest, the core Roam UI is very good and easy to use, you should just get the concept right.

We are indeed struggling to show the real value of Fibery to companies, since you have to have 3+ processes connected to feel it, and that is not so easy to do right away. We are learning how to demo Fibery better and how to explain it better. But when it clicks, retention is very good, since you are not ready to loose all these connections and flexibility in exchange of a more polished tools.

So our top problems as I see them are:

  1. Better getting started experience (we’ve added ready connected workspace with familiar domains and it works to some degree), but there are many things to improve here
  2. Core value functionality (Blocks in entity view, better connections better bi-directional links support)
  3. Side functionality that impedes adoption (permissions, users management, etc)
  4. Polishing and quality improvements.

I’d say we are still focusing on 1-3 more and 4 is a back-burner, but as I said earlier we are committed to make the change really soon and focus on smaller problems.

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I hear you. If “having patience” only needed to start today, I imagine it would be easier, but I understand you’ve been having patience for a long time now. Nonetheless it does seem as though some focus will be put on polish, which would mark an evident shift from previous priorities (though Michael’s message below shows that they have not yet shifted to focus on polish). It’s one of those frustrating moments where of course it would have been better to have this stuff done sooner, but it wasn’t, that can’t be changed retroactively. So here we are, and if it is indeed worked on soon, it will be something… and hopefully enough to help you guys feel better about Fibery’s long-term place in your orgs.

This may be an unwise thing to point out, but I can’t help but call it as I see it, too, and it speaks to Michael’s points below: you are talking about the issues with retention due to lack of polish, but you’re still here after over a year (I know that has never been and remains now not a given), and so are many others who nonetheless express their (understandable) frustrations. So your own case(s) demonstrate that Michael is right: once you get the value of Fibery, even though there are frustrations and non-ideal aspects, it does something that no other tool seems to do, and so it has some stickiness, despite even daily annoyances.

That is not to say that these issues of polish should not be improved, only that I do understand their priorities to-date to some degree. A high degree of polish is not going to translate into tremendously greater income for them, while developing and communicating their differentiating factors might. But as I’ve said before in this thread, it’s important to have balance, to indeed put some real time and effort into polish sometimes, ideally on a regular basis, even if features must still take priority. So the polish phase seems to be where we are now, fortunately. Later than you and I and others might like, but I’m still glad we are coming to it soon. :sweat_smile:

I took that to be Fibery/Michael’s typical irreverent wit, which I’m sure you’re familiar with now. But indeed in a situation where you already feel frustration and lack of confidence, this kind of approach can feel a bit flippant or tone-deaf. I get it. Still, I do not think it would be mentioned if it were not a sincere goal.

It is of course mere speculation on my part, but when I look at all the team has shared many times especially in the last 6 months that shows their issue and feedback lists, backlog, etc., it is clear to me that they do have a very big list of requests, and most of those are not the polish issues we’re talking about here. There is little that can be done about a genuinely big list of features and goals when money is finite except to just keep chipping away at it.

Michael has been fairly clear up until now that polish was not the priority. He may feel Fibery’s experience is more polished overall than you or I, but I think there is a clearly communicated understanding that some focused work is needed in that area, and will be started soon. I feel like I’m getting apologetic and repetitive though, so I’ll stop here. :smile:

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