Thread: Article on Nokia Slowing Down
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ragnar is offline ragnar
2009-08-05 , 13:10
Posts: 631 | Thanked: 1,123 times | Joined on Sep 2005 @ Helsinki
#105
Originally Posted by fms View Post
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.
Perhaps I ... I wrote in a way that can be easily misunderstood.

By "Not very helpful" i didn't mean "not very useful". Yes, it is useful to know, but knowing and being aware is not very helpful in making things better in itself. We certainly do prioritize to fix the showstopper bugs first. That's why sometimes apparently easy or small bugs seem to go unnoticed for a long time.

But more in practice, take working on Diablo vs. working on Fremantle as a concrete use case. Which makes more sense for us?

Originally Posted by fms View Post
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?
Ah, my favourite topic. I'll speak more on this once the Maemo 5 lead device is published. In the meanwhile,

we certainly do let our customers decide, by doing a vast array of usability tests, studies, evaluations etc. Dare I say, our (intended) customer base is far wider than several hundred responses here, and the results that you get from talk.maemo.org do not always correlate with the results you get from looking at things from a wider perspective. Sometimes they do, sometimes not at all.

I hope that nobody here is blind to the early adopter - developer bias that is apparent with all of us here on this forum. It would be a classic consumer understanding 101 failure to ... Ok, for an extreme analogue, hopefully you see the humour: If I would be in the business of creating a small portable flying machine for the mass market, I would be very careful in studying jetpack owners and doing exactly what they would tell me. I would certainly listen, but I wouldn't just go making a Jetpack+.