The Community Meetup- June 2023 Edition

Quicken Janean

Share your ideas and tag ones that you think need more visibility for Quicken below. We appreciate new thoughts and ways to improve the program. (Constructive criticism, please.)

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Jim_Harman

Thanks for requesting feedback, @Quicken Janean

I think the picture at the top that shows people, presumably representing Quicken staff, with their backs turned to us, sends the wrong message. It seems that they are ignoring us.

Also the copyright date at the bottom of the first page should be 2023.

R50.5 has also been released this month, with a long list of improvements. It would be good to highlight some of these.

It would also be good to highlight the new "Share your feedback" button at the top of the main window. How will Quicken use this feedback? Will users get any response to submissions? How is this different from the existing "Report a Problem" link? Note that this is highlighted in the What's new for R50.8 but it is not mentioned in the Release Notes.

Scooterlam

I think that the community newsletter should also include:

1. Guide users on how to search the community or use the in-app or online help content. Other than maybe the contant issues with connectivity, there is probably an answer to their question somewhere, if they only would search first.
2. Highlight 1 Quicken functionality each newletter to encourage users to explore and try new features. A summary followed by a community link to a post, a help topic et al that illustrates why and how to use the feature. Expand their breadth and depth of use of Quicken,.

Some room for improvement:

1. Releases so far… I would link, more directly, to those release notes that occurred since the last newsletter. R50.5 was a big one but not even mentioned ! Get users excited about the new stuff. Users will update if there is something in it for them. I know you have the support link there but my suggestion is to also link a popup to an expanded release note section for all notes that are relevant. I'll make a decision on downloading, after I review the release notes. As it is written now, I would shrug shoulders and move on, no action….Market it!
2. I agree with @Jim_Harman that the image is an odd choice. I get your marketing team wants to be edgy and clever, but it does send a wrong message to users IMO. Every time I see it, it reminds me of the bug reports, improvement ideas that get no response and no fixes, both in Beta and Prod.

mshiggins

@Jim_Harman and @Scooterlam great suggestions. I especially like the suggestion to highlight 1 Quicken functionality each newsletter. Consider including practical examples of how the functionality is useful.

jacobs

@Quicken Janean I've mentioned this before, but I don't see the value to users in seeing the Leaderboard each month. It's almost always a shuffle of 10 of the same top 15 or so contributors, mostly Super Users who hang out here and post a lot. How is this interesting or useful to users? (it's also a significantly different list/order of users than the leaderboard posted on the forum Home page, which is confusing.)

I've also suggested to you before that there be some additional content in the newsletter, like suggested above, to make it worthwhile reading for users. Of course, it would be great to have someone from Quicken provide a little content about what the teams are working on, but I know it's not Quicken's company culture to share anything with customers about the status of problem areas or progress on future enhancements. But you could have a short Q&A with a Customer Care manager about the best/most frequent/funniest calls from customers, with a tip about something like when wait times are generally shortest. Or if Quicken wants this to be focused strictly on the user community rather than the company or its products, then how about some content from the community. One approach would be picking issues where users have come up with ways to do things Quicken doesn't expressly handle, or handle well/easily, which come up repeatedly as questions in the forum. For instance, how people record and track treasury bonds, or how people record taxable IRA distributions, or how Mac users work around not being able to customize the order of the sidebar by renaming accounts with numerical prefixes, etc. the point is to beef up the newsletter a bit so it provides content a user might read and say, "ah, that's interesting/useful." There's just not enough meat in the current newsletter.  

Finally, where is this newsletter even posted? I see some past editions in the Announcements category and more recently in the Water Cooler category — but I don't see this one anywhere except in this Lounge post. Am I missing something? I'd argue that the Water Cooler is not the best place for this, since that's an area for posts NOT about Quicken; I don't follow and rarely look at the Water Cooler. The number of views for recent months is very low (28 in January, February doesn't seem to exist, 51 in March, 122 in April, 87 in May), so I think you need to try putting it somewhere with greater visibility — including a link on the Home page — and beefing up the content. And if you find can't drive more readership, consider scrapping it, because the amount of work to do it probably isn't justified for the small number of users you're reaching. 🤷‍♂️

bobluck

I would like to see an estimate of when planned features will be implemented, or work might start on them. We are strung along year after year subscription renewal after renewal. Dangling this empty promise of features to come that should be there to begin with.

i.e.

Planned · Last Updated August 2020
This request has been accepted and added to the development roadmap for future implementation. At this time there is no ETA on when this functionality will be available. CTP-405

now waiting patiently for 3 years for this empty promise to be filled with an expectation on your part we keep paying for a service that does not work the way we need. So yeah, the backs turned really hits home. Having to use software that is not customizable forces us to fit our workflow/financial life into someone else's paradigm.