Improving the Roll20 customer experience

Happy New Year greetings, This post isn't a bug report, but this is the closest forum for its intent: holistically improving the Roll20 experience. I decided to write this after installing the Roll20 app for iPad and discovering that it hasn't been working for about a year now. It gets stuck loading and does not recover. Its reviews on the iOS App Store, unsurprisingly, look like this: Ratings like these hurt a company's brand, and the lack of participation by the Roll20 team in the Roll20 for iPad and Android forum isn't helping: Unfortunately, the app is still prominently featured on the Roll20 home page: Either the app should be fixed and updated, or it should be removed from the home page and App Store until it can be fixed (or dropped altogether). To leave it featured-yet-broken sets an expectation that isn't met. From a customer experience perspective, it makes no sense to promise—and even build excitement for—something that can't currently be delivered. When we overpromise and underdeliver, poor experiences result. Here's a slide from a presentation illustrating what I mean: It's possible that the Roll20 team is behind on updating the website content, because I see that Google+ Hangouts support is still featured: And that "Read more…" link for Hangouts takes customers to a deleted wiki page—also a poor experience. My point here is not to bash the Roll20 team. I'm not upset. I love Roll20. I spent more than $100 here in 2016, and I'd love to see more people do the same. I would also love to see someone on the Roll20 team to take a look at things holistically and think about these questions: How do our customers (including prospective customers) feel when we tell them about an app that then doesn't work? And how do they feel when they see customers' bug reports and questions about that app go unanswered? Or how about when tiles on the home page advertise defunct features? Or when a link from the home page drops them on an empty wiki entry? It's natural for customers who experience these things to wonder if the Roll20 VTT will offer similarly poor experiences. That's unfortunate, because the Roll20 VTT is killer. My wish for Roll20 in 2018 is to improve the customer experience. You have many loyal, happy customers who will gladly help with that. Thanks for listening, and best wishes for the new year. Eric

well formatted i hope you also sent this in an email to <a href="mailto:Team@roll20.net" rel="nofollow">Team@roll20.net</a>

I would like to chime into this topic, Not only the app but many things on this site need to improve. That or at least the devs need to show us some progress towards something, anything. Roll20's latest efforts on the WebRTC only make me sad when I still see people having problems with it, and even sadder when there's a suggestion to drop the efforts altogether. (An endless loop of resources used up and a false sense of achievement) I lack the words to express this properly, but Roll20 has my players and my games hostage. I would like to discontinue my support to show my unhappiness towards the lack of progress, but at the same time, I have to keep delivering the same game experience towards my players who are oblivious to the rest of Roll20 because of my continued efforts to mask lacking features with heavy API. As voting with my wallet is out of the question I can only express this through my words in hopes that something changes somewhere...

it is my hope that once the team tackles the ever unruly canvas updates that alot of the suggestions with 100+ are handled in due course.&nbsp;

Yes, improvements are sorely needed. It took me 20 minutes yesterday to upload one token to my campaign and about 30 minutes to load my mod. It never used to take more than 5 minutes. The updates are great but i would trade it all for better performance!&nbsp;

Wanted to respond and say that we really appreciate getting the feedback in this sort of format. Thank you. The Google Hangout thing was supposed to get nipped ahead of January 1st, and we didn't push that out the door until folks got back from their vacations; it's gone now. We've got several places on the website where we're brushing up copy (including in our onboarding emails for new people), and those changes will be going into effect over the next couple of weeks. As to the iPad application; please note that our bug forum for that is actually closed-- it was only used for the initial start phase of those applications, and then we asked folks to bring those issues into the main bug area. That said, there seems to have been a pretty severe disconnect on our end in terms of nobody's eye being on the ball for the direct reviews on the iPad app, so I'm going to be doing some talking internally about figuring out who will be watching there going forward and just how dire the situation is with tablet apps currently.

Eullman, nice post.&nbsp; You were able to critique, but not bash. Thanks for bringing this to their attention. &nbsp;

How I wish I could&nbsp;critique that well. I want to say so much but it always comes out as if I am bashing Roll20 a I really do not want to do that. Well don eullman and Nolan T. J.