Feedback Loop
Comp is constantly evolving, and we take tons of cues and inspiration for future developments from your feedback. Here’s how the process works, starring multi-touch selection — a major feature we shipped last year.
Comp, like the creative projects it helps realize, is a work in progress. This is how our finely-tuned feedback system works — turning your ideas into official features.
— → You download the app. You open the app. You use the app: on your subway commute; in line at the Post Office; while you’re waiting for a coffee; during Scandal commercial breaks. There’s a brief learning curve to get the hang of the gestures, but you dig how easy it is to do quick brainstorms on the go. After having a chance to create and edit some new projects, you think — “Hey! I’d love to be able to select multiple and manipulate objects at the same time!” — and wonder whether that’s on our radar.
— → You decide to send us a quick note via our in-app feedback link.
“Downloaded Comp on the day it came out and used it immediately in conjunction with Adobe Draw to kick out a seven-page storyboard for a short film. Absolutely great. One suggestion: Please add the ability to group elements to then, say, center all of them to the center of the page. It really needs it. Other than that, happy customer here. Thank you.”
— → From your app to our inboxes; your note directly pings our community engagement and support manager Sue Garibaldi. She collects and catalogues everything — via the aforementioned in-app method, comments on our community forums, Twitter, and Facebook — in an expansive (and exhaustive) spreadsheet. Your email also gets sent to everyone on the Comp team — from designers to architects to engineers — so everyone can keep a real-time watch on what’s happening with Comp in the real world.
— → Sue coalesces all this info into a monthly report which goes out to the entire Comp crew. She groups similar responses together so patterns can be recognized; as it turns out, you weren’t alone: Multi-Selection tops the feature requests list.
— → Product manager Will Eisley notes the trend, and prioritizes Multi-Selection in the Comp to-do queue. It’s added to our Trello board, which tracks each and every feature being built as they transfer from person to person, on the way from idea to implementation.
— → Architect Rick Seeler gets the assignment to make Multi-Selection a reality. He begins writing code in Objective C and pushes it to a feature branch on GIT, the open source system we use for managing files.
— → Rick develops two strategies for users to use the tool, then loops in prototyping engineer Phil Badimon to create a new gesture as well. “What’s happening behind the scenes is that a larger object is created around the highlighted shapes, which allows you to resize and reposition them together,” he says. It takes some finagling to figure out how to account for objects that have a fixed aspect ratio, but ultimately they make it work.
— → The build is tested on a handful of devices running various iOS versions; it’s incorporated into creative Quality Engineering (QE) case studies (more on those soon!); it’s shared with our early access beta users, who share their thoughts. When it’s one-hundred-percent ready, the feature branch is integrated into GIT’s developer branch, where all our latest code lives.
— → We push a new release live, with the added multi-selection functionality.
— → You get to use it! Woo hoo!
Check out our How-To on using these cool multi-selection tools, plus more tutorials and creative projects coming up. Stay tuned!
Comp is free (!) for Creative Cloud subscribers* — download it now for your iPhone or iPad. Not yet a Creative Cloud member? Sign up for a FREE Adobe ID today and try out the latest CC apps too.
*Android users, we’ve just released a beta version of the app! Click here to become part of the pre-release program.
Check out our growing visual gallery for how-tos and at-a-glance guidance on navigating Comp.
Want to be the first to try out the latest Comp releases? Join our beta program for early access to new features, and collaborate with the Comp team in real-time on Slack to design and develop future updates. If you’re interested, fill out this short survey, and we’ll be in touch soon.
Lead illustration by Orlie Kapitulnik. Follow her on Instagram!
