The other day, on my 31st birthday of all days, I can only have what can be described as a “stupid bint” drive into the back of my Mini Cooper. Fast forward a few days, and I find myself stood in the foyer of my local Enterprise Rent a Car whilst the Mini’s in getting some repairs done (whilst I endure the Kia Cee’d)
Whilst standing in the queue of other loaners I found myself stood next to a “Community” board, which from what I could see consisted of letters sent in by “happy” customers. Most of these letters were praising the service they had received and how great the company was.
Now, a couple of things crossed my mind at this point – firstly, who the hell writes these letters (aside from old people with time to burn), and secondly, why do they write them?
If I went to a car rental place, and I was treated kindly and quickly, and given a clean car in good condition for a reasonable price with no problems whatsoever, I would consider that the car rental place had done their job, not gone above and beyond, and definitely not enough to warrant cracking out the Basildon Bond.
This then brought me to a relevant assumption – as developers of web applications, we never get any gratitude from our users, we only get the abuse. (Hear that tiny violin playing then?)
The reasoning behind this is simple – if our application is quick, responsive, and functioning completely as it should, it’s doing just that – working as it should. Hardly praiseworthy now is it?
Now imagine it’s not doing these things – but merely annoying your users by taking ages, returning errors and having an appalling Apdex score. You, as a user, are going to get grumpy, and then chances are about 1-5% of you will crack open an email and complain.
Therefore, it’s pretty safe to say, that if you’re hearing nothing from your users, then everything’s OK – you’re doing what you should.
But.
Let’s imagine that you’re normal and you do get the occasional old duffer write in and have a moan that your ACME Widgetron isn’t functioning as it should – chances are that there are as many as a hundred other old duffers who have issues, but can’t be bothered to write in, they’ve just buggered off elsewhere. Wouldn’t it be great to find out what their issues were so you can rectify them?
This is where products/services such as UserVoice come in. Firstly, these systems provide a low friction mechanism for your users to have a moan, and once they moan, you get to see their collective whining and not what problems you need to sort out soonest.
Secondly, these services also manage to give you some other information that would normally be reserved for the gratitude queue. By their absence, you can see what aspects of your application people are happiest with. If it’s not mentioned in the list of changes your users are submitting, it’s safe to say their probably perfectly happy with it.
Therefore, if you’re building a web application, be it for you or your clients, you should always looking at including some sort of feedback system as a priority – not only is it there for the customer support aspect, but also to tell you what people think of your application. But remember, people only tell you the bad things, it’s always good to remember that all the ones that are saying nothing are probably perfectly happy.
