Proposed feature requests on uservoice: Do we want them, or decline them?

[Christian Stimming]

Dear developers,

over the years the gnucash uservoice page http://gnucash.uservoice.com has 
collected quite a number of suggestions from users about features they would 
like to see in gnucash. By the "voting" feature of uservoice, those proposals 
are also in a meaningful ordering.

My assumption is that the vote numbers haven't been manipulated by single 
individuals (mostly because there hasn't been any incentive to do so), so I 
think the votes really reflect what "real users" really want. The interesting 
part in this story is that for new features, us developers tend to think only 
in terms of "what I want" (scratching my personal itch) and also "what is 
technically easily possible." However, those uservoice items tell the story in 
terms of "what a major part of our users want the most". 

I came to think we should listen to this voice, even when and specifically 
when those priorities contradict to our developer's ideas about the next new 
features. Here's the current Top 10 out of 220 items:

#1 Transaction Classifications 
http://gnucash.uservoice.com/suggestions/1543027 

#2 Enable multi-user editing  http://gnucash.uservoice.com/suggestions/1541003 

#3 Add Undo Functionality    http://gnucash.uservoice.com/suggestions/1542903 

#4 Make it easier for users to work with alternative/non-ISO/private 
currencies.  http://gnucash.uservoice.com/suggestions/2047887 

#5 Inventory system (mini inventory) 
http://gnucash.uservoice.com/suggestions/1540143 

#6 Add the ability to attached scanned images to invoices. 
http://gnucash.uservoice.com/suggestions/1535933 

#7  More charting: Budget vs. Actual chart 
http://gnucash.uservoice.com/suggestions/1539341

#8  Type ahead search when entering the accounts to a transaction  
http://gnucash.uservoice.com/suggestions/1589607

#9  Better Budgeting  http://gnucash.uservoice.com/suggestions/1562955

#10  Allow the database to be secured by way of a password   
http://gnucash.uservoice.com/suggestions/1547269

HOWEVER: My thought on this is debatable. Let's take #10 as an example: We 
used to claim we don't want to do password protection, thus we silently 
declined this feature proposal so far. However, I want to challenge this our 
year-long response. If you read the uservoice item carefully, the request 
isn't about any real encryption. What's asked for is some sort of "mild 
blurring" so that other users of the same PC cannot directly access the money 
numbers. If we take this user seriously, we can very well add a feature for 
obscuring or blurring the data file and at the same time state clearly that we 
don't do any real encryption here. In my opinion this is something that we can 
indeed add as a feature.

Alternatively, we should add some more honesty on the uservoice page. If 
requests such as #10 are considered a contradiction to gnucash's goals, we 
should really set the item on the uservoice page into the status "declined" 
and openly and clearly say that we don't want this behaviour in our project.

But my point is that the uservoice feedback gives us a strong hint about the 
things that are really important to the users. Those are most likely different 
from what us developers considered important. I would love to see us taking 
the user's priorities seriously here. And by taking the user's needs 
seriously, we might also find that the implementation to meet this very needs 
can be chosen differently and maybe simpler than what we initially thought. 

In those cases where the "real user needs" can be fulfilled by relatively 
simple implementations, I'd like to see those implementations be added to 
gnucash. For this reason I think all 10 of the above are valid feature 
requests. We should try to get them implemented. Maybe not in the full-blown 
glory that some of the comments there were hoping for, but some parts of the 
features can be done and should be done.

Regards,

Christian