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How not to keep your users happy

26 Feb

Tonight a new version of sharkbyte was released.
If you have not restarted sharkbyte/your computer, you do not have the new version.
If you do not have the new version, any file you try to play will appear offline, and you won’t be told why. Hopefully by the time you read this that issue will be fixed.

But in case it’s not, now you know.

This is not a good way to keep users happy, or keep users period.

Appropriate ways to handle these issues in the future:

  1. Do not break backwards compatibility every time there is a new release.
  2. Notify about and/or automatically update to new versions when they come out, like Firefox does.
  3. Notify users when they come to the website if they are using an outdated version.

Obviously these are general solutions that apply to any web desktop app, but it’s especially important if your entire site relies on that app to be working on a user’s machine. Imagine going to Google and getting no results for every search because you aren’t running the latest version of Google desktop. That would never happen, because it should never happen.

 
2 Comments

Posted in management

 
 
 

  1. How to keep your users happy on Rantings of a Grooveshark Dev

    March 1, 2008 at 5:06 am

    […] a sort-of follow-up to the negative example how not to keep your users happy, I’d like to provide what I feel is a positive example of how to keep your users […]

     

  2. New and improved Sharkbyte on Rantings of a Grooveshark Dev

    March 5, 2008 at 4:50 am

    […] I was not the only one who was very unhappy with the way Sharkbyte handles updates, so the Sharkbyte team has implemented a way to make sure […]