"Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts."

- Arnold Bennett

Generally, I'm pretty adaptable to technological change. In fact, I welcome it. I almost always feel that the changes and updates are exciting and will improve my overall user experience. However, last Friday, our whole office updated to Windows 8 (to support encryption for our HIPAA compliance policies and procedures) and for the first day I was not a happy camper. Switching from Windows 7 - a operating system I had been using steadily for 4 years or so - to Windows 8 was jarring. I'm a steady iPhone and iPad user and am used to the concept of apps, but for some reason, how Windows 8 delivers apps was just unsettling to me. 

My experience with Windows 8 gives me a little insight into how our MerusCase users must feel whenever we make a change and update the system. Normally, when we have a release of new features, we draft an article that outlines all of the additions to look for. According to our Release Notes/Articles, we haven't released since Friday, October 4th when we rolled out a new layout for Activities and the new Email Sync which forced all users to reenter his/her password into the email setup in Merus. However, we actually did a "part B" release to 3.09 last Friday, October 11th. 

Whenever we publish release notes in Merus, we get phone calls the Friday of release stating that we've broken a key feature in the system or that we've messed up a user's experience by adding another click in his/her workflow. Yes, sometimes we have a bug that needs to be addressed and for these instances we are sorry, but believe it or not, a fair amount of the changes or bugs people call in about are exactly how we've designed the product to operate. 

Sometimes we feel that users - aware of the fact that something has changed - need to find something wrong with MerusCase. Most of the changes in Part B of 3.09 were minor fixes. For instance, we pushed out the fix for Print Only This Activity which was previously duplicating part of the activity description when printed. Other changes were under the hood and not directly visible to our users, but helped implement more safeguards to ensure that Merus maintains HIPAA compliance. 

Our release last Friday wasn't feature rich, but it was a release nonetheless. Even though we released, not everything was changed or broken. Just as I need to give Windows 8 more time to embrace, I believe that Merus users need to give each release a chance and give themselves time to embrace the changes.