Poornima will be speaking about the Three S's to Successful Product Launch at Deploy 2010.
Early bird pricing ends Friday and we will be drawing names of today's registrants to win prizes like a membership to StartupToDo.com, and an autographed copy of Vanessa Fox's new book "Marketing in the Age of Google"
it only takes a few minutes to Register Now.
Do You Have A Product Problem Or Just a Few Frustrated Users?
Congratulations if you've got a product that has a large user base! Double congratulations if that user base is willing to give you feedback on your product!! Regardless of whether the feedback is positive or negative you have successfully established a community of users who are willing to voice their concerns to you. Now its time to respond, which is the tricky part. While it's important to address the needs of users, a software product's complexity is directly proportional to how many bells and whistles you are willing to incorporate to appease users. The more complex the product becomes the more design, implementation, and testing time it requires.
Evaluating User Feedback
Before you spend anytime coming up with a solution to resolve user issues there are a few questions that should be answered?
1. How widespread is this feature limitation or bug?
2. Is it a show stopper and is there an interim workaround?
3. What other features or user workflows is it impacting?
4. What is the cost associated with fixing a bug or implementing an enhancement (time, money, introducing additional bugs)?
5. What are the short and long term benefits to fixing a bug or implementing an enhancement (cleans up a slew of tangential bugs, save on customer support time)?
Determining the size of your bug
To answer #1 you need hard data as in how many users are actually using this feature, or experiencing this bug. Its easy for user to file tickets and be vocal on forums. To get hard data grep the logs for error and exception counts over the span of the days or weeks in which the issue was reported. Next, perform some database queries to figure out how many users are actually using the feature, that will tell you what percent of your active user base is affected.
Massive Problem or Easy Workaround?
When answering #2 realize that every user has influence especially the vocal ones! So once you've figured the actual percent of users its time to figure out if there is a short-term workaround. For example, is it only affecting people who use IE6? Message the workaround to your customer support staff and user forum.
Is the Issue Systemwide and If I Fix It Will I Face New Issues?
The point of answering #3 is to put the fire out in one feature before it becomes a conflagration. Think system or product wide rather than just about the isolated feature that is causing the current bug.
Even in times of continuous integration there are hidden costs associated with resolving user issues. Leaving aside the fact that a fix or enhancement can cause additional problems, it also takes away time that would have been spent on other tasks. So its important to understand the business priority of fixing bugs or coming up with enhancements before allocating and spending too many resources (developers and designers).
The corollary is that a resolution might improve product's quality and business' relationship with its user base so its worth investigating and resolving now.
To learn about launching a new product or version of your product from Poornima, attend Deploy 2010.
It only takes 3 minutes.