The Forgiving User

RingPack just underwent a major overhaul. With large amounts of code churn, it starts to become likely that new bugs will be introduced (especially Android’s fragmentation problem). This update was no exception — within 3 hours of pushing a live update, I saw a new crash, a few angry reviews, and one very upset email. Yikes!

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There’s a powerful lesson here. Budget time to rapidly respond to user issues on a new release. Luckily, I did. The telemetry data from the Android Developer Dashboard and Google Analytics let me respond within hours.

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The surprising thing is how quick users are to forgive once they realize you’re willing to work with them. Even something so impersonal as replying to their review does a lot to diffuse the situation. Of course, your mileage may vary depending on how critical your app is to the user’s life.

Adoption

I was curious how quickly people would upgrade. The answer is — not very quickly.

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This is 48 hours from the launch of version 8. The subsequent versions are minor bug fixes.

Roughly 700 users saw the update and gave it a try. Amazingly that’s only about 5% of the user base. I see that as both good and bad. On one hand, lazy updating means more users with a sub-par experience. On the other, it’s nice that only 5% hit the nasty crash in version 8.

In conclusion,

  • Budget time to rapidly iterate
  • Be responsive and respectful to all users (even the angry ones)
  • Love your telemetry

Following these rules can quickly reverse the damage done by a rocky launch.