Thread: Article on Nokia Slowing Down
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fms is offline fms
2009-08-05 , 12:45
Posts: 1,418 | Thanked: 1,541 times | Joined on Feb 2008
#104
Originally Posted by ragnar View Post
But you know, feedback like "Hey, this thing doesn't work (it's not fast enough or good enough or easy enough or it's crashing), why don't you fix that" isn't always the most helpful one. Those are things that everyone is already trying to do right anyway: make things easy and fast and not crash. They generally aren't things that we could just snap our fingers and make things right upon hearing them from someone (or hearing about them for the 1000th time).
Here you can see the first sign of trouble. For me as a user (and therefore for your marketing department) this kind of feedback should be the most important one. Your "thing" should absolutely, positively work 99.999% of time. That is why people love Apple so much: their things always work. Nokia has got a much patchier history of things working.

Instead, as a developer, you call this kind of feedback "not very helpful" based solely on the fact that you can't address it by simple finger snapping. Yes, I am a developer too, and I know how much we would like to only address feedback that is easy to address. The life is tough though, and this is one of behavioral patterns that will not help you succeed in life. So, you have to constantly fight it, if not as a person, then at least on management level. Your management has to insist that you fix the show-stopping bugs first, not just the "easy" bugs.

Then, feedback like "Yes, I see what you're doing, but why don't you add features A, B and C" is problematic with the previous kind of feedback, balancing between quality vs. quantity of features.
This category is different in the sense that it can wait until the next hardware release or at least until the first category is fixed. Nevertheless, if several hundred users scream "give us that damn dpad" at you in unison, do you really think it is a good idea to answer "well, it is not our intended usage case". Why not let your customers decide on the usage case?

And then you have got a bunch of people who cannot be satisfied no matter what Nokia does. This, of course, does not mean that you should disregard every single suggestion or complaint by grouping everyone in the above category.

No company has infinite resources, nor there is an infinite amount of skilled labourers available in the job market (take Maemo SW, or skilled Symbian developers, or any platform of your choice). Nor hiring people has an instant effect on improving quality: it takes time for the skill of the organization (and its individuals) to build up.
Well, then why waste your resources on rewriting the whole UI almost from scratch, then discard it only to rewrite it again in QT? I am not saying QT is bad, but isn't this plan looking strange in the light of limited resources?

But I do think it's a misrepresentation of Nokia in general that we wouldn't gather feedback, or that we wouldn't listen to it.
If you ever talked to PR people about their work, I am sure they told you at some point that it is not really important how things really are. It is only important how things are perceived. And, take it or leave it, I suspect that most Nokia users will see Nokia as not responsive to their feedback.
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