I’ve recently had a conversation about Reloading Studio features, what should be built, what’s not so useful, etc. And I was asked why the ‘shotgun feature’ was missing from the web edition of Reloading Studio.
Good question he said!
One of the problems with the desktop version of Reloading Studio was my complete lack of client-side instrumentation (i.e. I can’t tell what’s happening in the app or how it’s being used). The desktop app connected to the activation server to check its activation status, that’s it.
I had absolutely no visibility of feature usage, feature popularity and general application usage patterns. It’s important to note that I am not talking about users’ data, rather the actual workflow of application usage. I couldn’t tell what features are being used, how they are being used and what’s not being used at all.
The only feedback I received was anecdotal, from users themselves and what I heard was that the ‘shotgun feature’ wasn’t being used. In fact a lot of messages were asking how to disable this feature to save screen real-estate. Based on these interactions I’ve made an assumed and in the interest of time I decided to omit this feature from the web development effort.
Unfortunately I’ve fallen victim to the Survivorship bias, because users who were using it weren’t saying anything!
This is something I should have investigated further. After digging a little deeper and contacting a few shotgun shooters I had a pretty good idea (as good as it gets without proper instrumentation) of how the feature was being used.
We can split the feature into two:
- The catalogue module (i.e. list shotguns) – popular and easy to build. And
- The load development module – thankfully least popular and very complex to build.
With that in mind, please stay tuned.
The cataloguing part of the shotgun feature will be added back to Reloading Studio. I have added to the feature roadmap. It will get done in the foreseeable future. This will include catalogue and maintenance module.
The cartridge development part of the shotgun feature does not seem to be super popular. It is also very complex to implement (with calculations and component tracking). This part of the feature will not be built in the foreseeable future.