We’re dedicated to making Sense awesome. Here’s how we do that and how you can help.
How we do it
Providing you insight into your energy usage is the core of our product. Thus, improvements to device detection are our #1 priority and the bulk of our roadmap is dedicated to these improvements. Still, these insights rely on a positive user experience with Sense, so we’re continually making improvements on this front as well. We get our ideas for new features internally from members of our various teams, from users here at community.sense.com, via our Support portal, and via social media. It’s a tough process to decide what to work on next, but here are some questions we like to ask ourselves when deciding what features to develop:
- How many users and prospective users can this feature benefit?
- What is the composition of the users this would benefit? Early adopters/specialists, general consumers, small business, utility/professional partner?
- How long will this feature take to learn? We have a broad array of users, from those with engineering or machine learning backgrounds to those who’ve never heard of load disaggregation. New features should appeal to as many users as possible.
- How does this feature fit our core goal of providing real-time insight into energy usage and home activity?
- How long will this feature take to implement, on the part of our development teams?
How you can help
If you have a feature you would love to see in the Sense app or a hardware revision you’d love to see, we’d be happy to hear it! Please keep in mind that in we may not be able to fit it onto our short-term road map, depending on other ongoing development work, or even get to it at all, if it turns out that it doesn’t line up with our long-term goals for Sense. Here’s some questions to ask yourself and some tips to think about before submitting a feature request.
- Can Sense already do this? Check the previous release notes to make sure you didn’t miss a new feature.
- How will this make Sense better for a lot of people and not just me?
- Has this been asked for prior? Search the Product Wishlist forum first and ‘like’ existing Wishlist items instead of re-posting! Use the comments section to discuss any how you’d like to see the feature implemented.
- What exactly will this accomplish? What will you do with this feature? Don’t be vague about the benefits. Features that are developed for their own sake are not good features.
- Avoid emotion-based discussions and motivations.
- Be realistic about function. Don’t ask for Sense to do something totally outside of its core functionality.
- Be realistic about time. Development is a heavy ship to steer, even at a small company.
- Only ask for one specific feature in a feature request. This makes it easier for us to sort through feature requests and makes it easier for others to support your request
- Use a descriptive title. This makes it easier for us and your fellow community members to sort through feature requests