synnack

, I'm turning my geek attention towards a rewrite of maxforlive.com with new features.

What new features do you want on maxforlive.com?

http://kwiksurveys.com/p/1LGE1EQR?qid=624407

(vote for up to 7 features, pick the ones most important to you! have an important one not listed? post it in the comments below)

Also note this survey is open until March 1st 2016 so please help spread the word and let's get a good view of which of these people like the most before then!

Now that my new release is finally out, I'm turning my geek attention towards a rewrite of maxforlive.com with new features. 

What new features do you want on maxforlive.com? 

Vote on the most requested ones here: http://kwiksurveys.com/p/1LGE1EQR?qid=624407

Also note this survey is open until March 1st 2016 so please help spread the word and let's get a good view of which of these people like the most before then!


vote-for-new-features-on-maxforlive-com

thank you for taking care of maxforlive.com!!!!! I appreciate it very much. I just went through your survey, but did not submit anything. That is because there is one aspect that I am missing - which I find important in oder to "ramp" up that great repository:

Currently there is no (more or less) reliable way to evaluate the quality of a device without downloading, testing and examining the code myself. That lead me to rarely using it in the past: testing to be sure a device is production ready - often takes as much time as writing it myself.

I think it would be very helpful to have a community process included, to evaluated if devices meet the Ableton coding standards for M4L (they published them a long time ago) on which systems and in which circumstances they were tested, and so on... A well tested device, that meets the coding standards could get something like a "production ready" tag, and search function should include a filter to only show those devices.

maxforlive.com is a community platform, so I don't think a curated section of devices would be necessarily to way to go (while writing... i ask myself why not... ??). But most important: even from messy or buggy devices it is possible to get inspiration. They all should have a place there, but I'd love if it would be easier to distinguish them.

thank you for taking care of maxforlive.com!!!!! I appreciate it very much. I just went through your survey, but did not submit anything. That is because there is one aspect that I am missing - which I find important in oder to "ramp" up that great repository:
Currently there is no (more or less) reliable way to evaluate the quality of a device without downloading, testing and examining the code myself. That lead me to rarely using it in the past: testing to be sure a device is production ready - often takes as much time as writing it myself.

I think it would be very helpful to have a community process included, to  evaluated if devices meet the Ableton coding standards for M4L (they published them a long time ago) on which systems and in which circumstances they were tested, and so on... A well tested device, that meets the coding standards could get something like a "production ready" tag, and search function should include a filter to only show those devices. 

maxforlive.com is a community platform, so I don't think a curated section of devices  would be necessarily to way to go (while writing... i ask myself why not... ??). But most important: even from messy or buggy devices it is possible to get inspiration. They all should have a place there, but I'd love if it would be easier to distinguish them.

Jan wrote : "Currently there is no (more or less) reliable way to evaluate the quality of a device without downloading, testing and examining the code myself. That lead me to rarely using it in the past: testing to be sure a device is production ready – often takes as much time as writing it myself."

Completly agree although downloaded devices rarely get comments, so I'm not sure people would rate the programming quality.

Jan wrote : "Currently there is no (more or less) reliable way to evaluate the quality of a device without downloading, testing and examining the code myself. That lead me to rarely using it in the past: testing to be sure a device is production ready – often takes as much time as writing it myself."
Completly agree although downloaded devices rarely get comments, so I'm not sure people would rate the programming quality.


Thanks for the feedback. Ultimately it's easy to create a "Production Ready" or "Ableton Compliant" tag but it still reqiures the community to first, know the guidelines, second, review each device for compliance, third, flag it appropriately. Since only the creator of a device can tag it in the current model, it would only be that person who could do it. Given these are the people making the non-compliant devices it's not likely we could rely on them to self police this.

1) The content is curated. I.e. someone at Cycling74 or Ableton has permissions to rate devices as approved or complaint. I certainly have no bandwidth to do that and I would expect the vendors would say the same. For a while I tried to have "featured devices" that showed the most interesting and highest quality ones on the front page but anything that requires regular and frequent manual analysis is a non-starter for me. No time.

2) I think what's needed is a "reputation" score. Specific users should earn reputation points the more, and higher quality devices they post and you could have a view/filter that only showed devices from developers with a high rep score. This would work over time but we still have the problem of how does someone earn a good rep?

The bottom line here is that the site needs a good way to rate devices and their creators. The way it's implemented today with a 5 star rating system we get VERY few actual ratings. People download all day, but rarely go back and rate devices. Until we fix that problem I don't think I can really address the "production ready" issue.

This is why I have on the survey the feature to change the 5 star rating system to a simple thumbs up or thumbs down. I think users are far more likely to click a "like" button (i.e. thumbs up) than they are to decide and click a 5 star rating. There's a lot of data out there on this stuff. Check out why YouTube went from 5 star to simple thumbs up/down. I'm thinking if I change to the thumb model, we got a lot more interactions that later can be used to more easily show "highest rated" which you'd hope also meant higher quality.

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-dominate-ratings.html

http://uxmovement.com/thinking/how-the-thumbs-uplike-button-is-dumbing-users-down/

I also like the YouTube behavior in that any video you give a "thumbs up" gets added to your "Favorites". We could do the same on maxforlive.com so any device you give the nod goes to a favorites list you can refer to later to track your favorite devices over time.

Keep the feedback coming folks. Good stuff.

Thanks for the feedback. Ultimately it's easy to create a "Production Ready" or "Ableton Compliant" tag but it still reqiures the community to first, know the guidelines, second, review each device for compliance, third, flag it appropriately. Since only the creator of a device can tag it in the current model, it would only be that person who could do it. Given these are the people making the non-compliant devices it's not likely we could rely on them to self police this. 

I see two options on this:
1) The content is curated. I.e. someone at Cycling74 or Ableton has permissions to rate devices as approved or complaint. I certainly have no bandwidth to do that and I would expect the vendors would say the same. For a while I tried to have "featured devices" that showed the most interesting and highest quality ones on the front page but anything that requires regular and frequent manual analysis is a non-starter for me. No time. 

2)  I think what's needed is a "reputation" score. Specific users should earn reputation points the more, and higher quality devices they post and you could have a view/filter that only showed devices from developers with a high rep score. This would work over time but we still have the problem of how does someone earn a good rep? 

The bottom line here is that the site needs a good way to rate devices and their creators. The way it's implemented today with a 5 star rating system we get VERY few actual ratings. People download all day, but rarely go back and rate devices. Until we fix that problem I don't think I can really address the "production ready" issue. 

This is why I have on the survey the feature to change the 5 star rating system to a simple thumbs up or thumbs down. I think users are far more likely to click a "like" button (i.e. thumbs up) than they are to decide and click a 5 star rating. There's a lot of data out there on this stuff. Check out why YouTube went from 5 star to simple thumbs up/down. I'm thinking if I change to the thumb model, we got a lot more interactions that later can be used to more easily show "highest rated" which you'd hope also meant higher quality. 

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-dominate-ratings.html
http://uxmovement.com/thinking/how-the-thumbs-uplike-button-is-dumbing-users-down/

I also like the YouTube behavior in that any video you give a "thumbs up" gets added to your "Favorites". We could do the same on maxforlive.com so any device you give the nod goes to a favorites list you can refer to later to track your favorite devices over time. 

Keep the feedback coming folks. Good stuff.


Vote for new features on Maxforlive.com