I’m Giulio Andreini, a Product Designer at n8n. As you know, at n8n, we are always working to provide a better user experience to our users. Currently, we are designing some new features that will offer more power and flexibility to the Nodes’ functionalities. We would like to test these features with you to ensure that they make sense to our real users.
We are looking for n8n users who are willing to participate in a maximum 1-hour usability testing session and have a conversation around these new features.
If you are interested, please send me a direct message here in the community.
Thank you in advance for your availability, and we are excited to show you what’s coming next!
This is not entirely a feature request, but there are two very serious things that can be addressed, from my point of view.
Please make fewer broken unannounced Friday releases. This is really a pain, as pulling latest Docker release has became a gamble over last months. Maybe some API checks with proper tags can be used for this. I know new version announcements are already in place, but they don’t work in a convenient way. With the recent Enterprise self hosted plan this can be a relief. I regularly see how n8n enthusiasts struggle to convince business ppl that it’s a reliable solution compared to, let’s say, Make.
In the past, monthly community meetups were so helpful to keep track of what’s going on. Since Harshil’s departure this aspect also gradually deteriorated. It would be cool to keep track and know what to expect and so on.
For those who read this, pleas upvote if you agree.
Thanks a lot!
This post is about user testing, it feels like a new topic would have been a better option.
We are looking at bringing back the community meet-ups but at the moment we do not currently have anyone doing that role, hopefully this will change soon.
For the first part I am not sure how to answer that but I will give it a go, we do weekly releases of n8n and we don’t plan to break them. We have recently spent a lot of time on improving our release process and have introduced a lot of tests so this will get better.
For any enterprise self hosted customers I would always recommend not upgrading to the latest release until it has been ran in a test environment first using your own workflows to check for any potential issues as while we do have some tests it would be very tricky to test every possible workflow combination.
Ok, sorry, maybe I misunderstood the aim of this thread. Didn’t find the way to convert a comment into a new post, though.
Thanks for the update about community meetups, would be really great.
About the broken releases.
I noticed the following pattern: new releases with .0 subversion are available on Fridays. Then a few days later one or more patches are released. So basically, when I go to github releases I see the newest info. However, the n8n documentation page with the release notes is updated a bit later and often includes info about bugfixes.
So there is a gap between what users get when they pull the latest version and what is documented on the n8n website.
The problem, from my perspective, is that there is no easy way of understanding what recent release (not necessarily the latest one!) is tested and considered “good enough” (i.e. users didn’t post many issues). I would expect some labels (stable / recommended etc.) either on github or in the API with the version checks.
So whenever I request new versions via API I can see which releases are marked as “stable” and can update to the most recent one. I understand that these labels can be delayed, because some time is needed to realize that users don’t complain about critical issues after a certain release is made public.
To be honest my recommendation even with a stable marked release would be to set up a test environment as it is possible that something you have is not like what other people are doing so while having the labels could be useful and very welcomed it isn’t going to solve all the issues.
I would love to say you are wrong, but you are sadly 100% right. There was for sure a huge increase of bad versions recently (and honestly, some very bad ones). That is also something that kind of breaks my heart every time. In the past, if that happened, I could simply go in, fix the problem and release a new version within an hour. That is sadly not possible anymore as I am obviously not that involved in the code anymore, and both the code and processes got more complex.
We for sure also saw that and already started a while ago to start to improve the situation. Partly by what @Jon mentioned, introducing more and more tests and improving our release process. Those are sadly not things that are very visible on the outside and partly take some time to make a difference, but actually, a lot has happened there already. One more visible thing that you have maybe seen is we started to release bug-fix versions also for older n8n versions. Meaning in the past important fixes got applied only to the most recent n8n version, which was bad because there was obviously always the risk of that new version introducing new issues as well. Now we back-port them, which enables users of older versions to also get access to fixes.
We also brought the team together to understand better why those issues happened (esp. the larger one) and to learn from them to ensure it does not happen again. On top are we right now already in the process of preparing what you have mentioned above. We will start to have some form to stable/latest, … how exactly that looks like is sadly not 100% clear yet. But it is something which will be introduced the latest with the upcoming n8n version 1.0, maybe even before.
I agree with @jon that is probably not really what @giulioandreini meant when he posted but it would be great if you and others would keep on sharing such worries. Either post them publicly on the forum or write us directly if you do not want to have them public for some reason. Hearing from users esp., the ones that really care about n8n but have frustrations is probably one of the most important things for us to ensure n8n will be successful long-term.
I am really sorry for all the recent issues! We promise to try to improve our game as we are better than this!
Btw. regarding the missing version information in the docs. You are right they are not always directly available there. But what becomes directly available the second a new version got released is the information in our Changelog here: https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md
That will always provide information about all available n8n versions and what changes they contain. I already asked the team to link to that page as well as right now probably not that many people know about it.
Hello again !
We’re currently designing a new feature that will help teams work on their workflows with more confidence. To ensure we’re on the right track, we would like to showcase the feature to some n8n users and run a short usability testing session.
If you’re interested in participating, simply reply to this message or send me a private message. The session will take about 30 minutes.
Your participation will help us design and ship features that meet your needs.
Thanks for your support
I’m Giulio Andreini, a Product Designer at n8n. As you know, at n8n, we are always working to provide a better user experience to our users. Currently, we are designing some new features that will offer more power and flexibility to the Nodes’ functionalities. We would like to test these features with you to ensure that they make sense to our real users.
but it would be great if you and others would keep on sharing such worries. Either post them publicly on the forum or write us directly if you do not want to have them public for some reason. Hearing from users esp., the ones that really care about n8n but have frustrations is probably one of the most important things for us to ensure n8n will be successful long-term.