Each year around Christmas we ask our current members to provide important feedback and make product requests through our charitable survey. I really love this project because your responses not only help us plan the year ahead, but they are always full of positive and appreciative comments that really rejuvenate and motivate the team. We enter the new year with good clarity on who our members are and what they truly want. Not to mention being excited about delivering on their requests.

If you did reply to our survey, thank you so much for your participation! If not, there’s still plenty of time (it never expires). We collected nearly 900 responses this year with many still trickling in. I’m excited to share the results with you, and some of the background behind the questions we ask.

Why are we sharing the results?

I’ve never shared our survey results before, but I thought you might enjoy knowing more about what other members of this community want, and seeing how closely your needs align. I’ll leave out a few questions I would consider “sensitive” market research, but otherwise this post will break down each question, why we asked it, what the outcome was, and what we plan to do with the results. I was really blown away this year at how nice some of the comments are, and we couldn’t resist sprinkling a few of those throughout this post. Enjoy!

"I came for the themes, but stayed for the widgets. Your tutorials, however, are the icing on the cake. Your videos on responsive Muse were excellent. Keep up the good work across the board.” – Survey Response

Part 1 - Multiple Choice Questions

Question: What best describes your work situation?

Why we asked: to find out the mix of freelance/self-employed vs. corporate/agency use of our product. 

The results: over 80% of our user base is self-employed. The “other” category primarily included students, educators, and hobbyists/retired users.

What we’ll do with this: I believe price sensitivity is more important with self-employed individuals. Corporate customers don’t typically approach spending decisions the same way, and we need to be aware of keeping our pricing at an attainable level. We have no intentions of raising prices in the immediate future, and existing members are always locked in at their current price. Given how similar your professions are, I believe there is an opportunity for us to be more interactive and encourage our community to do so as well. Since you’re nearly all business owners, I’m sure there is a ton of information you can share with each other to be more successful with Muse, web design, marketing or general business information. We just need to give you the platform to share this knowledge, such as our forum or something even more interactive and engaging.

Regarding students and teachers, we DO offer significant discounts to those who meet this criteria. Please email us at accounts@musethemes.com for more information.

Question: What is the primary reason you signed up for MuseThemes?

Why we asked: This helps us know how to prioritize our design and development time between widgets, themes and other products.

The results: Consistent with past years, 3/4 of users join primarily to access widgets.

What we’ll do with this: We’ve always invested a little more heavily in widgets than themes, and this data confirms that’s probably the right direction. Although many users reported that even though they initially joined for the widgets, they ended up finding the themes, stacks, and tutorials surprisingly useful and an unexpected perk of the membership.

“Thanks for responsive themes and tutorials. You are doing well with new widgets. Just when I think of something you seem to have thought of it too. Kudos!” – Survey Response

Question: Are you planning to renew your MuseThemes Membership?

Why we asked: This question works as a general satisfaction question for us, and gives us an idea of how to invest in our growth based on renewal revenue.

The results: nearly 80% gave an outright “yes,” which is awesome and amazing! Of the 21% who answered “maybe,” most left a comment stating either they hadn’t used our product long enough to determine, or they may abandon Muse altogether for another web design platform such as Wordpress, Squarespace, etc.

What we’ll do with this: Stay the course! We'll keep working hard to add value to your membership, building cool products and giving you reasons to keep coming back each year. Renewal revenue is very important for our business, so we’ll always a huge amount of effort goes towards keeping current members happy, rather than only enticing new signups.

"I think you've got it nailed. Really, I am so impressed with MuseThemes. You guys are so professional, so honest, and actually caring. This really shines through, and is something so special and rare these days.” – Survey Response

Question: How would you rate the complexity of our themes?

Why we asked: Last year our survey indicated themes were too complex for many users, and we needed to focus more on simple layouts that can be quickly edited.

The results: 3/4 users felt they were at a good complexity level, with the next most common response being that they are too easy. This is great news and shows our efforts to make a change this year were successful.

What we’ll do with this: In 2016 we made a major effort to simplify some of our themes. There’s no point in starting with an existing design if you can’t easily modify it to deliver a client site. Our Build theme was a great example of a simple fixed-width layout that many users said was one of our best themes ever. In 2017 we’ll keep up this trend of offering a good mix of simple / flexible layouts and complex / innovative ideas along the way.

Question: How would you rate the complexity of our Widgets?

Why we asked: To ensure our products weren’t too complex (or too easy) for users, and to decide how far we can push things technically.

The results: 3/4 users felt widgets were an appropriate complexity level, and most of the others said they were too easy.

What we’ll do with this: We have big plans for segmenting widgets in 2017, to ensure a good balance between simple / highly compatible widgets and advanced products. I could tell you more, but I'd have to kill you.

Question: How important is it that clients can update their own website?

Why we asked: To determine how much of our development efforts should go into content management and client-editable solutions for Muse.

The results: I would interpret this as a 60/40 result. If you safely assume that a user who answered “occasionally important” needs CMS abilities 50% of the time, then you’re left with a result of 60% saying it’s extremely important and 40% saying it’s not at all.

What we’ll do with this: We already have several new Connect series CMS widget spec’d out and ready to build (and a few in testing, almost ready to go). Based on many comments in this survey we believe offering an “à la carte” selection of CMS widgets is a better solution than trying to build a single system that can do it all. Users should be able to choose and combine the tools they (or their clients) need, rather than installing and maintaining a complex system that overdoes it. No need to hammer a nail with a sledgehammer.

"Guys, I am genuinely inspired by your business. I am sure behind the scenes there can be chaos at times ironing out creases and problems but on the surface MT is very calm, very straight to the point, friendly and beautifully open and honest. You're a business that feels like a friend and it's a real pleasure to use you guys.” – Survey Response

Question: Short Answer - What elements of your website do your clients need to edit?

Why we asked: This question was only presented if you told us content management was important in the previous question. The word CMS is extremely vague, and means very different things to most designers. We wanted to find out exactly what parts of a website your clients truly need to edit.

The results: Your answers were surprisingly consistent, with “images and text” being 90% of all responses. The remaining 10% included answers such as blog posts, creating new pages and updating galleries.

What we’ll do with this: One of my biggest fears with releasing a super complex custom CMS (e.g. Agent) was that it would require 50% or more of our company resources to satisfy a very small segment of our users. I think that fear was justified. This survey indicates that most Muse users have basic CMS needs (simple text / images), and it's clear we don’t need to build a Ferrari to compete in this race. A stylish and reliable product that “just works” will do the trick here.

Question: Where do you prefer to host your websites?

Why we asked: We wanted to know the true breakdown of how many users hosted sites on Adobe Business Catalyst vs. alternative options. 

The results: The results for hosting preference were varied, but only 1/4 of users host their sites on Adobe BC.

What we’ll do with this: As you may already know BC is extremely limited in it’s support for server side code. This limits us to basic widgets that mainly utilize JavaScript for functionality. If we don’t need to worry about supporting Business Catalyst as a host, we could build much more complex widgets that utilize server side systems – this means blogs, directories and more.

Part II: Short Answer Findings

The remainder of our survey questions were short answer, so it’s not possible to publish a graph explaining the results. I read each response carefully over several hours, and tried to summarize common themes and requests. Here are some of my findings: 

Things that Make MuseThemes Users Happy

I made a list of items that made users happy. Simple as that.

• Clear and Transparent Communication – we try really hard to be transparent and keep in touch often. Honesty is always our policy. We’ll absolutely keep this up and expand on our efforts, perhaps through webinars, live training, or interactive Q/A sessions. Our monthly member updates are a big hit; users appreciate knowing what is going on behind the scenes.
  
  
• Build Innovative Widgets – our Connect series was a survey favorite, with many users saying these widgets have completely changed their workflow in Muse. We have big plans to expand our Connect series way beyond what it can do now; so stay tuned. Other vendors have started to emulate our Connect system (as we expected) but we'll always do it better.
  
  
• Tutorials – this year I’m going to expand our tutorials into more general Muse training. Expect to see comprehensive courses on mastering the basics of Muse and essential tips / tricks. We also plan to overhaul our video organization on the site to ensure you can easily find what you need.
  
  
• Stacks – members love our Stacks! We’ll make a big effort to put out more Stacks this year, and simplify some of the layouts. Perhaps something less artistic.

Things that Make MuseThemes Users Mad

It’s fun to look at the list of items that you love, but we can learn a lot from users who are upset. Here’s a few things that we need to work on:

• Widget Bugs / Upgrades – some of our widgets aren’t as flexible as they should be. When we design a widget we often build it based on a specific use scenario, and if designers try to utilize it in a completely different or innovative way, it breaks. I’ve got some ideas for the new year about how to better prioritize our bug-fixes, and if budget permits we’re even looking at bringing on a new developer to focus specifically on existing product improvements.
  
  
• Support Response Times – when something goes wrong you deserve a quick response, and we currently run a 12-24hr average response time on support tickets. We’re going to try and improve this metric in the new year by increasing our support resources and bringing back our live chat system. In 2016 we closed nearly 14,000 support tickets, so it's an area of the business I don't take lightly.
  
  
• Updated Videos – it's annoying when a widget doesn't look anything like it's training video. We're a little behind on updating some of tutorials to match the latest release of the widget. Between the addition of another staff member (Ashton) now helping me to produce videos, and our ability to use "playlists" for videos (instead of replacing single videos) we believe we can offer much more comprehensive training for each product.

Final Thoughts

One word that I heard repeated 100's of times in our results was trust.  Members stated that MuseThemes is the Adobe Muse resource they trusted most, and that they felt confident using our products in their client websites.

I think this is a powerful message that I'd like to make our focus in 2017. Sure, there are some great developers out there who can build a nice-looking widget, but if you don't trust the code they're putting into your site or that they have your best intentions at heart it's not worth using. We'll work extra hard in 2017 to ensure we build trust with our members and solidify our place as an essential partner to your business.

That’s it! If you agree or disagree with any of my survey assessments, or feel that I’ve missed something important, please feel free to comment on this post below.

Thanks again for a great year! Enjoy the holidays and we'll see you early in the new year.

Cheers!
Steve Harris

“All in all, you've found a way for people like me to find something at a great price point that has quality and value to it. I've looked at other sites trying to compete and they don't hold a candle to Muse Themes." – Survey Response