What 1,600 support emails taught us

Support at Starter is me, most days, with Sam covering the phone line on Business accounts. I read every message that comes in, and since January that has been 1,612 of them. About a fifth are billing questions. The rest are about using the product, and a surprising share of those were not about code at all.

“Where did my change go?”

The most common question, by a distance, came from editors who had changed a page and could not see it on the live site. The answer was almost always the same: the change was saved as a draft and had not been published yet.

We had a publish button. It just did not say how many unpublished changes were waiting. In 2.11 we added a small dot to the button and a list of changed pages inside it. That question went from about thirty a month to four.

“Why can’t I edit this?”

The second most common: an editor clicks a list of logos or testimonials on the canvas and gets no caret. Those lists are bound to a collection, so their rows are edited in one place and every section that shows them follows. That is the right behavior, but nothing on the canvas said so.

Now a bound list is one target. Clicking it opens a small card beside it with the rows, and a link to the full table. Nobody has asked this question since August.

“Can I undo that?”

Deleting a section used to ask for confirmation. People clicked through the dialog without reading it and then wrote to us. We removed the dialog and added an Undo button to the message that appears afterward. Fewer clicks, fewer mistakes, fewer emails.

What developers ask

Developer questions cluster around three things: how to make a new field show up in the inspector (add it to the YAML and the props, with the same default), how to bind a list to a collection (a source line in the YAML), and how to keep a section’s script working after a page swap. The documentation now opens with all three.

“Will this break my site?”

A quieter question, but an important one, came from developers about to try Starter on an existing app. They wanted to know what it would touch. The honest answer is: the folder your site lives in, one service provider, and nothing else. We now say that on the install page in one sentence, and the question has mostly gone away. When it does come in, I send the same reply: try it on a branch, and delete the branch if you do not like it.

How we use the inbox

Every Friday, I tag the week’s messages by what they were really about, and the five most common tags go into the planning meeting on Monday. It is not sophisticated. It is the most reliable source of product decisions we have, and it costs one afternoon a week.

If you write to us, you will get a reply from a person within one business day, and there is a decent chance your question changes the product.