When I was finished with My Animal Age, my wife mentioned to me that I should allow the user to input their age once and then show the animal ages for every animal. As it stands now, the app requires the user to put in their age for every animal.
After it was published, I was discussing apps with an Irish man who made something similar. He mentioned something very similar: allow the user to input their age once for all animals.
I chose not to update the app and change this.
I have a myriad of reasons. It would take time to change the user flow. I never intended to gain anything but education and fun from making it. I never expected any real money or notoriety. I could go on, but you get the point.
Obviously the app has never taken off. The paid version, so far, has only been purchased 15 times, including by myself. The number of trials are around 150-200. The free version is much larger but the ad network (Ad Duplex) isn't a revenue driven one but a discovery based one.
I find it interesting and fun to take a look at the statistics I built into the app to see how the trial version gets used SO MUCH, sometimes with people using the two trial animals upwards of 50-80 times. But those appear to not find it fun enough to purchase.
Then I met Terry Meyerson, head of Windows Phone division at Microsoft, at the Windows Phone 8 fan meetup before the release event on Oct. 29th. We talked and I mentioned my app. He asked to see it. And guess what he said?
"You should let the user enter their age once for all animals."
I never felt like running straight to my computer to write code as much as I did right then.
I am in the process of updating My Animal Age, mostly to understand the differences between 7 and 8, but I am taking the opportunity to incorporate this change in user interaction.
I also wonder, if I had listened to my wife and the Irish gentleman, would My Animal Age have received far greater purchases and prestige? Did my inclination to not listen to user advice possibly kill my app's chances? Is this the reason I received a 1 star review from Brazil?
I think this applies for everything we coders do. We always need to listen to our potential customers, fellow coders and, despite our best desire to believe we only know the best for our software, it's usually not.
So keep an ear out and be opened minded, OK?
That's really interesting and something I've encountered in my app development also. People saying, "Oh, it should work this way..." and I respond, "Yeah, but it works this way..."
ReplyDeleteThen, of course, it turns out their right.
There's only a certain amount of forcing a user to do certain things you can do. After that, you've got to adapt the app to them. It sucks, especially after it's been awhile and you don't want to touch the code again but when you get a consensus like that, I guess you just have to do it.
Really great point, dude.