Yes! Well put. Just because a thing is covered in the Tutorial, and the Manual, and questions have been answered about it on the forum and on social media doesn’t mean that a user actually finds this thing out in the course of installing and using the software. Many folks just install and start using, turn to social media/forums/YouTube if they’re confused, and consult documentation (including the tutorial) dead last. I agree this would be a good thing for L&L to investigate further
There were originally a tonne of questions about whether the user was aware of the help materials on the site, had completed the tutorial, and so on, but then the survey was getting huge (after all, there have already been complaints in this thread that fifteen minutes was too onerous an ask). So we decided to split all of those questions off into a separate marketing and support survey that we’ll run in a couple of months. The current survey contains what we want to know right now, but of course no survey is perfect and it’s very easy to recognise flaws in retrospect (but then surely that’s one of the reasons for running a survey in the first place) - it seems, however, that we have a number of users who are experts in surveys and are taking some pleasure in picking apart everything that was wrong with ours. We may well have to run a survey asking users for feedback on our survey at this rate. 
One of the reasons we allowed so many areas for comments, though, was so that users could tell us if we’d missed anything with the questions.
Anyway, I’m not going to justify our survey any further, as we’re very happy with it - we’ve had a great response, are hugely grateful to 20,000+ users who have completed it so far, and are looking forward to trawling through the results, which are going to be hugely informative and useful.
But perhaps they should do it the other way around, and first of all take a close look at the excellent Tutorial. I know of course that many people don’t consult User Guides and Tutorials, but that’s their fault, and certainly not something to be encouraged.
Scrivener is a very powerful and versatile tool, which in order to be used to its full potential inevitably requires the investment of a certain amount of time and effort. If someone is not willing to do this, perhaps Scrivener is not for him/her, and he/she should stick with Bean, Pages or whatever.
Well, that’s one perspective, and one style of cognition and human interaction.
A product like Scrivener, however, is only made possible by winning and retaining a large number of customers, and that is bound to bring a large variety of working contexts and learning styles.
Neither ignorance (nor intolerance) of that variety is really likely to help very much with the design of the GUI, or with reference and tutorial materials.
Knowing that a tutorial, or the element labelling in a GUI, works well for one client doesn’t tell us anything about the balance of effort and reward that it brings to another.
Working contexts, mental contexts, and learning styles are all very variable. To keep the whole thing viable and thriving, it’s better to have more insight than less.
( It’s not for a thriving business that we remember the name of Procrustes.)
I’m not in the position to judge whether what is said in the first part of the sentence is true or not. But what I know, is that Scrivener for what it costs, is a steal; for a similar application, one could also imagine another business model.
And perhaps it’s ultimately all about the question what Scrivener is or should or could be, and for whom; and that’s up to the developer to decide.
But apart from that: it’s clear that we see certain things differently. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Hey, that’s great! Superior minds think alike… 
No need to justify, just, “Yeah, we’re on that…” Cool. I know at least one one user who has strong opinions but never visits the website or forums, despises email lists, and belongs to no social media service. I’ve turned them on to the survey, and I’ll make sure they get the word on the follow-up when you release it. 
“Wrong” and “justified” are never words that mean very much : -)
Learning about customer difficulties is always helpful – and that’s all that people have expressed here,
but if you feel prone to experiencing the difficulties of others as criticism of yourself, then maybe just delegate the customer-facing stuff to a colleague who enjoys it more, or finds it less painful and baffling ?
Better to focus on the parts that you like …
Please let’s try not to transform this discussion into some kind of philosophical discourse (Quid est veritas?). Saying that something is wrong is just common language for saying that in your opinion something should not be done or a certain road should not be taken. Which of course takes it for granted that others could judge differently.
And let’s not forget that Keith is quite exceptional in discussing similar things with Scrivener’s user base. Most other developers don’t discuss anything publicly.
I completed the survey a few days ago and was more than happy to do so. I found myself wondering, however, why others were stating it took so long to compete. It took me less than five minutes. Also, some of the questions others here were referencing did not appear on my survey. Then I twigged. I don’t use Scrivener as my main writing app any more. So, naturally I ticked that option which meant the YES: NO logic of the survey diverted me away from the questions surrounding which features I found useful. I kind of understand this. As a non-current user, why focus on what features I’m now not using. Having said that, I was a regular Scrivener user and i think my views on features would add value to the discussion. For instance, my only reason for moving away from Scrivener is the iOS app’s lack of features when compared to MacOS. Pretty much all of the Mac features I believe to be indispensable. I just cannot get on with the iOS and iPadOS version.
No survey will be able to capture everyone’s thoughts. But as a user who is interested in the future of Scrivener, and one who may very well consider coming back, it felt like most of my opinions were not collected on this occasion.
I will be very interested to see how this survey influences the future of what is still one of the best writing apps out there.
Two dysfunctional translations at work here:
- ( they say I am “wrong”) is a dysfunctional mistranslation of (Customer experiences difficulty). It creates a feeling of distress in the the developer, and blocks the digestion of insight.
- (what they report is not “justified”) is an even more dysfunctional mistranslation of (Customer experiences difficulty) It’s a baffled protest that customer difficulties do not, or should not exist. It’s also a cry of pain.
Neither of these mistranslations can be good for the emotional health of the developer, or for the health of the business and its product.
There are, in fact, plenty of developers who do talk directly to customers – DEVONThink, Omni, TaskPaper, Tinderbox all come directly to mind – but it may not be the best use of time for the main developer if they can delegate it to other colleagues.
Receiving reports of customer difficulty with curiosity, an open mind and a robust sense of self-respect, and creatively transmuting those difficulties into solutions, takes a very particular set of human, cognitive and interpersonal skills, which are unlikely to be the core strength of every developer.
This is not an accurate statement; it is dogma. Sometimes the customer is wrong and their difficulties and viewpoint is not relevant, because they want something that you don’t want to provide, or have completely mistaken expectations no matter what reasonable steps you have taken to manage those expectations.
I’m so confused about why some people are lecturing on the finer points of the meaning of “wrong”. Maybe it’s a way to deal with writer’s block?
Anyway Keith, the survey seemed just about “the opposite of left” to me. It was non-wrong in the colloquial sense, but subjectively speaking, I’d have used a slightly less serif, i.e. some serif, font.
And still nothing on the Apple Watch version?
Speaking as someone who has a lot of experience working customer service, this is very much on point. So many customers think they’re experts, but very rarely do they turn out to be right.
I spend a good bit of time in the DevonThink and Tinderbox forums. Neither company is shy about telling people that they are “wrong,” either in that they are trying to use a feature in a way that’s outside the design scope, or that they are fundamentally misunderstanding some aspect of the program.
Katherine
This thread went off in a whole different direction than I’d have expected from my comment 
For my own little “defense,” I did the tutorial over seven years ago 
You are more than welcome to disagree with me and to question L&L’s decisions (politely). Feedback on the survey is fine. There’s even no explicit forum rule that forbids you from attempting to obfuscate embarrassment over your initial mistake - that you didn’t read the survey email or introductory page - through circumlocution, semantic quibbling over the word “wrong”, piling on, and changing the subject to new, unrelated criticisms of L&L. Moreover, I fully admit that one of my own responses was not as professional as it should have been, which I regret. However, I will not tolerate accusations of ignorance and intolerance (ironically!), silly comments about “cries of pain”, or snide insinuations about my emotional health, mental state, self respect or interpersonal skills. Such petty personal comments step way over the line of politeness and civil discourse, and such behaviour is not welcome here. I very rarely ban anyone because healthy disagreement is the life blood of any forum, so you may keep posting - but only if in future you are able to present your arguments without descending into ad hominem attacks, and also to accept that you may not always be right, any more than the rest of us. If you are not able to engage in discussions here in such a spirit, then I’m afraid you’ll have to take your opinions elsewhere.
Thank you for that feedback; that’s useful. I figured that users no longer using Scrivener wouldn’t want to spend as much time on a survey, and we were also mainly interested in the main reasons they left. You’re right, though - in retrospect, this was a missed opportunity. The survey shunted both those who no longer use Scrivener and those who decided against using it following the trial to the same set of follow-up questions. I wish now I had asked the former group a few more questions about which features they miss now that they’ve moved away. Fortunately we have hundreds of notes from such users left in the provided “comments” boxes, and we’ll be reading every single one of them, so hopefully those who, like yourself, wanted to tell us more, have at least had the opportunity to provide some information there. To be honest I underestimated the number of users not using Scrivener who still care about it or are curious enough about it to want to give us feedback. While naturally the vast majority of respondents are current Scrivener users, these other responses have been pretty amazing and incredibly useful.
Thanks! And ha - wait, I hope that was a joke; I’m not actually sure as some people might genuinely want a Watch version. 
Oh I hope you don’t feel like you need to defend anything - this thread went a little astray, but it’s useful to know that “scrivenings” isn’t necessarily a known term even for users who’ve been using Scriv for a while. Out of interest, do you use the feature? This is when, say, you select a folder, or several different documents, and then select the “multiple page/document” icon in the segmented control in the toolbar (on the left of the corkboard icon), so that you see a number of documents in the editor as though they are a single document (with dotted line dividers between each document by default). I’m just wondering if it’s something plenty of people use without knowing the name of. (It ended up getting called “scrivenings”, by the way, because anything else we came up with - “multi-doc editor mode”, “multi-section mode”, “multiple documents” - was either a mouthful or ambiguous, and “scrivenings” has a nice self-deprecating sound to it: “I’m just working on my scrivenings…”)
Thanks for the reply, Keith. Scrivener certainly has a special place in my heart. It was the reason I originally moved on to the Mac ecosystem, long before a Windows version of Scrivener was even a glint in your eye.
I often visit the website and forums here to keep an eye on how the world of Scrivener is developing, and every time I sit down to start a new project, I consider coming back in to the fold. As I said in my original post, I personally would like some changes to the iOS version to convince me to make that transition back. Mainly because I like to work flexibly, and don’t like being tied to my desktop machine always. Scrivener for iOS is very good. It is just missing some key Mac features which disrupts my writer’s muscle memory when I can’t find them there.
Anyway, as you pointed out, I crammed as much detail into the boxes which were available to me. So, I hope you find my comments helpful. I wish you well with the survey and hope it helps provide some clarity regarding Scrivener’s future development.
All the best, and who knows, I may very well be tempted back by your future plans.
In my experience, Apple Watch users dictate a lot of notes to their watches. So I’m sure Watch Scrivener would find a receptive audience.
Katherine
I’ve used Scrivener and loved it for years now (on all its platforms) and enjoy reading the posts here but rarely comment, however it’s been bothering me that I gave some wrong answers in the survey.
I went through the entire thing saying I didn’t use Scrivenings as I’d no idea what it was 
. Now I do. I use Scrivenings all the time, I just didn’t realise what it was called. Like someone said much earlier in the thread, it’s so familiar to me that I never thought about it having a name. Maybe I did know once, and I definitely know now, but not when I was filling in the survey. So I’m sorry for my ignorant (and wrong) ‘I never use that feature’ responses. I find it very useful and use it all the time. I hope that there weren’t too many like me giving the wrong answer because we never learned the proper name 