All companies love listening to their customers, or so the marketing men would have you believe. They welcome all forms of feedback and positively encourage any kind of constructive criticism. Behind the scenes, away from prying eyes, it’s often a very different story – letters are discarded, emails ignored and phone calls are dumped within the bowels of an automated voicemail system.
No-one could accuse National Instruments of such a cynical deception. It has long since recognised that customer feedback can transform the functionality and ease-of-use of the products it offers. This led it to launch what is now a hugely successful online community for its LabView graphical programming system, which is used by scientists and engineers for the development of measurement, test, and control applications. Members of the community are encouraged to work together to submit ideas, collaborate on their development and vote for the suggestions they like best. National Instruments takes this information and uses it to enhance the next version of LabView.
The ideas exchange has proved a phenomenal success. More than 200 ideas were suggested over the past 12 months and about 15,000 votes have been cast. The feedback had a discernible effect on the development of LabView 2010 and included 14 user-suggested improvements. Additional enhancements are working their way through the development process and will be included in LabView 2011.
“The idea exchange is a fabulous capability,” says Jeff Kodosky, co-founder of National Instruments and widely regarded as the father of LabView. “It allows the community to vet ideas among themselves and vote on them. What bubbles to the top is the stuff that’s going to have the biggest impact and it’s the most efficient thing for us to be working on. It’s a great tool.
“In addition, the user groups and the online support forums are incredibly valuable. I’m impressed by the quality and the quantity of the content that’s posted there and the enthusiasm and camaraderie of all the participants.”
So what happens when an engineer has an idea for an improvement? The first stage is to browse by label or search to see if the idea has previously been submitted. If it has been, users are encouraged to vote for the idea to indicate approval. If it has not been previously submitted the user uploads the suggestion and the community begins to rate it and add their input. Then as interest in the suggestion builds and the votes start to add up, National Instrument’s research and development team start to consider the idea and its on-screen status changes. It can then be tracked as it moves through the development process.
What it does
LabView was introduced in 1986 as a means of reducing the complexity of programming by giving users drag-and-drop, graphical function blocks and wires that resemble a flowchart to enable them to develop measurement, test, and control applications. The platform offers integration with thousands of hardware devices, providing built-in libraries for advanced analysis and data visualisation, and is scalable across multiple operating systems.
LabView 2010 attempts to deliver time savings with new features such as off-the-shelf compiler technologies that execute code an average of 20% faster than previously. The compiler summarises tasks such as memory allocation and thread management. With LabView 2010, the compiler data flow intermediate representation has been further optimised, and low-level virtual machine, an open source compiler infrastructure, has been added to the software’s compiler flow to accelerate code execution. National Instruments says it has conducted benchmarks ranging from real-world customer applications to low-level functions, and the new compiler delivers an average improvement of 20% across these benchmarks.
LabView 2010 also includes the add-on developer program which establishes an online marketplace as part of the updated tools network for developers to offer their free and paid toolkits and a location for users to browse, download, evaluate and purchase the add-ons. More than 50 add-ons from National Instruments and third-party developers are available, including code reuse libraries, templates, UI controls and connectors to other software packages.
For more advanced users and development groups, LabView 2010 includes new features that improve interfaces to reusable code, group VIs and their hierarchy for faster build times and separate the VI source code from the compiled version to aid in source code management. These capabilities are ideal for large group development where code maintenance across many users, software versions and computer platforms is critical.
“You are only allowed to vote on an idea positively, or not at all, and you can only vote once on each idea, because we want to encourage users and don’t want any element of competitiveness,” says Jeffrey Phillips, National Instrument’s LabView product manager, based in Austin, Texas. “We have found that the online community moderates itself very well. There is a strong sense of self-policing and we find that, in general, the best ideas always rise to the top.”
Phillips admits that not every user suggestion can be developed. “Some just cannot be progressed as they work against fundamental decisions that have been previously made. In these cases we supply the online community with an explanation of why we can’t take the idea forward.”
One of the most popular user-suggested improvements incorporated into LabView 2010 was a means of making code easier to read when using wire labels as part of the graphical programming element of the software. Tracking connections across long wires in LabView code could sometimes be difficult amid complex representations of on-screen data. So LabView user Paul Falkenstein of Pennsylvania made a suggestion to improve code readability by adding labels to long wires, thus making it easier to know which wires belonged to which terminals. The improvement gained support from within the online community, attracting 216 positive votes. It was then taken up and progressed by LabView’s development engineers and National Instruments says the feedback received since it was launched has been extremely positive.
“This is a perfect example of how the ideas exchange can improve usability,”
says Phillips. “The ability to add a label to the wire means code can be documented so much more clearly. It improves readability. This was an idea that was quite simple to implement but it has made a huge difference.”
Phillips expects LabView 2011 to contain at least as many user suggestions as its predecessor. He says that the ideas exchange has become one of the foremost ways National Instruments garners feedback from the scientists and engineers who use LabView in the measurement, test, and control sectors.
“Their success is our success – it’s as simple as that,” he says. “The added functionality in 2010 was well-received by the people who most wanted it. The primary focus in 2011 will be to improve edit time usability and to make the software more responsive and streamlined. And many of those improvements will come from the feedback we receive from our customers in the field.”
User-suggested improvements from the LabView ideas exchange
Improved usability
- Edit subVI wire connections faster: Changing wire terminals for subVIs via the connector pane used to require excessive mouse clicks. Now it is possible to change connections faster with a new keyboard shortcut.
- Differentiate string data with new terminal radix: String data is often simple text, but it can also represent hex data, ‘\’ codes, and passwords. A new radix on string terminals toggles to display the kind of string data assigned, making code easier to read and troubleshoot.
Redesigned block diagram objects
- Streamline block diagram with the flexible merge errors nodes: Instead of using a handful of merge error nodes to combine error data, the new node expands to collect as many error wires as the code requires, reducing clutter on the block diagram. (Below, diagram 1)
- Reduce block diagram footprint with new cluster constant: The new cluster constant is another space-saving feature. After defining the elements in a cluster constant, it is now possible to right-click on it to replace it with a small icon on the block diagram to clear up space and improve code readability. (Below, diagram 2)
New LabView project management functionality
- Close all VIs within a project and use improved project/VI menu display: As LabView applications become more advanced, developers often have multiple projects open at the same time. Previously, the “Close All VIs” menu option closed all open VIs and not just those from a particular project. The new version includes a new “Close All VIs in Project” menu option, making it easier to manage large numbers of VIs and multiple projects.
- LabView 2010 also includes improved navigation in the Windows menu, where projects and VIs are separated from each other to make it faster to switch between projects.
New time-savers with Quick Drop
- Replace an object using Quick Drop and create custom hotkeys: With the Quick Drop feature, users can search, select, and place VIs using a short series of keystrokes. It is now possible to use Quick Drop to replace a selected VI with another from within the Quick Drop utility, saving users more development time. It is also possible to create specific hotkeys to further improve programming efficiency.
