Too late to submit Negative feedback for R2012b !

The Jan Simon's question Experiences with release 2012b shows that a lot of experienced users find the new MATLAB interface horrible .

However , there were 2 opportunities this year to submit your feedback to MathWorks to say them that you do not like the ribbons.

1. February 2012 (before R2012a was shipped): the MATLAB Desktop Beta . Let me quote an email of the MathWorks which reminds us the aim of testing : _We appreciate your help in testing prereleased software. This gives you the opportunity to contribute feedback directly to MathWorks Development staff and get early access to software that is not yet commercially available._This was the first opportunity for MATLAB users to discover the new interface.
2. June 2012 : *R2012b_Prerelease*Another opportunity to discover the new MATLAB interface and to submit his feedack

So I have 2 questions :

Question for MATLAB users : Did you test one of these beta and SUBMIT your feedback to MathWorks?

Question for TMW : Did you receive negative feedback about the ribbons?

Answer 1

[Oleg Komarov]

I did test the R2012b_prerelease and I submitted my feedback as mentioned in the other post Aurelien linked.

However, I am not likely to send a negative feedback unless is truly disrupting my workflow (like it did for the run configurations), and the ribbon wasn't really that bad (you can minimize it and use the QAT).

I also think that the "horrible" ribbon is a result of an escalation of negative feelings and betrayed expectations auto-alimented by community feedback. What I want to say is that we could all feel a bit disappointed on our own, but when we gather together then we become outraged (herding). However, we cannot talk on the forum about the pre_release in its testing phase, thus the reaction of the herd can only be assessed ex-post.

BTW, not to late to submit feedback on R2012b but for R2013a!

[Malcolm Lidierth]

I tested the MATLAB Desktop Beta and gave them feedback. Bugs have been fixed but the overall design remains the same. In fact there is no obvious design difference between the Beta and the release.

Answer 2

[Jan]

I did not test 2012b-pre because I do not have an active maintenance licence currently.

There is no overlap between the wished features (started in Feb 2011) and the implemented features.

[EDITED] Not concerning ribbons, but the new help style:

Look at the help text about the figure properties. This is much harder to read than the corresponding page, which is found in 2011a locally. Search for the ButtonDownFcn for instance:

• The important header "ButtonDownFcn" is written in normal weight and typewrite font with an empty line before the paragraph. Then a lot of paragraphs is following which contain one or two sentences only, but the separating vertical spaces are very large.
• The header for the section, which describes the usage starts with a +2 fontsize bold Using the ButtonDownFcn. This looks more important than the main section about teh ButtonDownFcn.
• Headers and text start at the same horizontal position, although there is a huge space on the left and the right.
• The giantic margins on the left and the right, additional margins in medium grey and the generous usage of empty lines almost around any sentence, less than 30% of a full-screen window on a 4:3 19'' monitor contains information. On wide-screens this will be less, I'm afraid.

I did not see the online help before the release date.

[Daniel Shub]

There is also little overlap between the 265 bugs in MATLAB (not counting toolboxes) that have been reported and the TMW acknowledges as bugs and the 35 that were fixed. That is less than 15%.

[Jan]

@Daniel: Plus the number of new bugs which will be found in the next weeks. But this concerns only the public list of bugs, which appeared in the community. But I assume there is a longer internal list also, e.g. about the features of undocmeneted and built-in functions like UITREE etc.

[Robert Cumming]

I've just looked at the help online for the 1st time - why has the menu to find related help topics removed? The amount of white space wasted on the screen is madness...

[Oleg Komarov]

I agree with you Jan, it's impossible to quickly find when one property starts.

Answer 3

[Robert Cumming]

I also suspect this was a decision taken some time ago -> a strategic management decision....

It would of taken a lot of time to develop and hence - there wouldn't of been enough time to revert back to the previous menu based system based on any negative feedback recieved. Also if they did revert back - what would the difference of been between 2012a and b?

Just my humble opinion...

I've only just migrated to 2010b so it will be a while before we upgrade and I hope its either seen to work or we can skip a release or two and the menu will have come back.... (hopeful thinking I imagine...)

[Aurelien Queffurust]

Your suspicion was correct . From a MathWorks marketing email I have just received , I can read : "Résultat de 5 années de R&D, la Version R2012b propose un nouvel environnement MATLAB" which means that R2012b is an output of 5 years of R&D

Answer 4

[Aurelien Queffurust]

Thanks everyone for your feedback. Only Oleg and me seem to have tested the Prerelease. I guess TMW will never answer about the percentage of users saying that they dislike the new Desktop ;)

As Robert mentions, I suppose that even if a lot of beta-testers had reported negative feedback on the new Desktop , it would have been too late to change it! Also agree with what would have been the diff between 12a and 12b!!

Anecdotally : Testing the February MATLAB Desktop Beta was a big challenge FOR ME ... there was a bug which prevented me to type the Square Brackets [ ] ... so you can imagine the big issue when you develop !!!! I of course reported this issue but never received any workaround .

For Jan Simon , maybe it would be nice that experimented users like you have the possibility to test the beta even if you are not under SMS. Imagin you find the ML 8.0 incredible , you could easily convince your colleagues to renew the SMS and update

To quote Oleg: BTW, not to late to submit feedback on R2012b but for R2013a!

[Jan]

@Aurelien: I'm the IT admin of the institute myself. I asked about the experiences of other users to find out, if I'm willing to buy 25 new licenses. Currently it looks, like the decision will not be very hard.

[Andreas Goser]

I am not sure wheter decision makers will make a statement here. I think I am pretty neutral. From what I understand, the design changes in general (not the ribbon only) have been made to address different types of users. A lot of negative feedback comes from experienced, software-developer type of users. I believe the user base doing interactive work will be happy. The majority of Simulink users will probably do not even care about MATLAB and so on.

I was hoping that the changes satisfy everybody. This seems not be the case.

The question Aurelien raised whether MathWorks received negative feedback is a good, but difficult one. Of course there was. And of course there were users saying "finally". But it is extremely difficult to draw conclusions from such feedback. I personally like to spend my time into forwarding enhacement requests to Development and help users to work efficiently with what we have.

[Robert Cumming]

Is R2013a available for beta testing? If I google it I get this thread!

Is a link available here? Does it link to your current license?

[Andreas Goser]

Customers with active software maintenance service (SMS) can access the Pre-Release (which has a much higher quality than a 'beta'). Pre-Releases are available a couple of months before the release. For R2013a you can expect Decemeber 2012.

[Walter Roberson]

With regards to convincing colleagues to renew SMS and update MATLAB:

In some places, it would not matter if all of MATLAB and the toolboxes had been only $100 per year for the site. Such as places where the admins are free-software advocates who believe that it is better to expend several person-decades redeveloping functionality than to pay any license or maintenance fee.

[Daniel Shub]

@Walter it seems like you are grouping free as in beer advocates with free as in freedom advocates.

[Andreas Goser]

@Walter: In addition, a lot of those places underutilize MATLAB capabilities by far. I will never forget a (commercial) customer call based on a complaint and it turned out they used MATLAB only for importanting MS Excel spreadsheets and making colored pictures from this data MS Excel can also easiky create...

Answer 5

[Michelle Hirsch]

Answering Aurelien's second question:

We received lots of feedback throughout the process of developing the Toolstrip and documentation center, literally hundreds and hundreds of individual points of feedback. While it might not be obvious from the communication online, the majority of feedback was positive.

We analyzed everything that we heard, both quantitatively and qualitatively, working particularly hard to pull out the constructive elements from the critical feedback. One significant result of this was quite a bit of refinement of the design and integration of features specifically intended to support our most experienced users. Those of you who provided specific workflow-related feedback on the Desktop beta can likely see features in 12b that were direct responses to your input.

[Aurelien Queffurust]

Thanks Scott and Andreas for answering. I remember that myself I had written in the survey for the Beta or Prerelease 12b , that I liked the new desktop . So I am not surprised when u say that the majority of feedback was positive.

It is really incredible the negative reaction that we can read for example in the comments of Loren's blog . I hope (for TMW) that as Oleg says above it is maybe a "result of an escalation of negative feelings and betrayed expectations auto-alimented by community feedback."

I imagine what the discussion can be about currently in TMW offices ;)

Answer 6

[Robert Cumming]

I had no access to the beta version for testing - so no opportunity to provide feedback.

[Walter Roberson]

Likewise I did not have access, not until August (and then I had other things to do.)

Answer 7

[Aurelien Queffurust]

FYI, R2013a Prerelease is available for download. The doc is better than 12b :

The documentation now includes a table of contents that can remain open and does not overlap the content.

When you search the documentation, the search terms are now highlighted on pages linked from the search results in the Help browser. In addition, when the search term occurs within a collapsed section on the page, the browser expands the content.

So try it and do not hesitate to submit your feedback which can be done directly via Help > Request Support (new feature available for prerelease)!