Survey early 2021: What do you think of Gladys Assistant 4?

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Hello everyone!

I like to do surveys from time to time, I find that it allows for quite varied feedback & from members not necessarily on the forum.

If you could take 1 minute of your time to give your opinion on Gladys 4, taking into account all the improvements of the last few months, that would be great :folded_hands:

As usual, I will make the results public (anonymous) so that we can improve the product!

PS: Of course, if you need new features in Gladys 4, there is the « Feature Requests Â» category on the forum: Demande de fonctionnalitĂ©s - Gladys Assistant community. :slight_smile:

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@Albenss I saw your message about the poll « Can’t wait for the deployment of ready PRs, Â» what are you talking about? :slight_smile:

Are you looking forward to the PRs in development, or are you talking about the « Docker build of PRs Â» part? :slight_smile:

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@hadais04 Thanks for your survey response!

When you say:

Interesting project, but it seems to be aimed at professionals or « geeks Â».

What makes you think that? In Gladys 4, the philosophy is really to have a product accessible to everyone, I’d be curious to hear your feedback :slight_smile:

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For the one who said:

I love the project: the original idea, its evolutions and its respect for privacy. But it can sometimes be frustrating because we always want developments to move faster to offer the same capabilities as older and more advanced projects (Home Assistant, Jeedom, etc).

That’s for sure, we all want everything to go fast :smiley: I am the first to be in a hurry, and to want to find in Gladys 4 all the integrations we had in v3, and that these projects have.

But well, software development takes time, especially when you want it to be well done.

These projects took years to develop, and it will be the same for v4, we need to be realistic.

After that, we really have a great team and things are moving fast. I am quite confident that Gladys will gradually take all the missing bricks and become a reference :slight_smile:

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I’m talking about the Pull Requests that seem well advanced, such as the one for Yeelight, the ChartBox for the dashboard, and finally Zigbee2Mqtt which is not far behind either. I can’t wait for Gladys to extend these services to attract more people, including Devs :wink:

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Hello everyone!

Thank you again to those who responded to the survey.

I have exported the responses and aggregated them in a spreadsheet.

I have removed the emails :slight_smile:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iPt5aoI9VGwg-FWSfE4jaNw7NZtyDA6pYanEB0ycWck/edit?usp=sharing

Overall, we can see a good satisfaction around the product and the general direction the project is taking :slight_smile:

After that, what comes up the most is the lack of integrations, but that’s normal as it takes the most time!

What I also note is that the communication about the available integrations is not necessarily effective enough: There are requests in the survey that are already developed ^^

Perhaps more time should be invested in communication/training around Gladys 4:

  • Writing tutorials?
  • Blog articles?
  • Video tutorials?

After all, it’s always a trade-off: doing communication or developing features?

I think I may have been very focused on development in the last few months to address major gaps (multi-users, bluetooth presence, etc.) but now that we have these major features, I can dedicate more time to communication and reduce the time I spend coding/reviewing PRs (the ideal would be 50% dev/50% communication)

Development is not everything, we also need to talk about the product to get new users :slight_smile:

Product Growth

We had a big boom in installations the first month of the launch in November (780 unique instances of Gladys), but it has slowed down to around 485 instances in February.

Edit: here is the number of new instances per month (this is not the « stock Â» of instances, it is only the new ones per month):

Screenshot 2021-03-08 at 13.49.17
Screenshot 2021-03-08 at 13.49.171694Ă—464 35 KB

Despite this, we have 3200 unique visitors to the site each month. I think there is work to be done to get more users to move from just visiting the site to becoming Gladys users.

I think we are missing use cases to show how our users use Gladys: explaining real cases in articles so that site readers can project themselves.

This is what we do here for example:

Everyone in the community is welcome

When you want to « help the project Â», you often think of development and PR on the code, but that’s not all: proposing new tutorials/articles on the site helps just as much! :slight_smile:

The site is open-source and editable by everyone I remind you: GitHub - GladysAssistant/v4-website: Gladys Assistant website · GitHub