CintaNotes Developer wrote:Sorry for the delay, now finally feeling better and getting back to work.
I'm absolutely taking this as a learning opportunity, and huge thanks again for describing so clearly
how it should ideally work.
... a customer email list, and I'm going to literally set it up tomorrow,
to have a way of instant message delivery to CN users.
Also we have a new website in development, and there we also plan to include ability to subscribe
to a mailing list.
Wow - Thanks for your reply, and I'm glad you're feeling better (I've heard there's a nasty bug going around, very unpleasant. Thanks for waiting until you're uncontagious to get back to us
)
I
really appreciate
responsive developers, and
especially those rare few who are
really able to listen to criticism (like mine) and can take it constructively, rather than instantly becoming defensive, treating it as a personal attack and refusing to hear it, or even attacking it.
So I'm glad I bought CintaNotes, even though I had a bad experience with it right away, since I know it will only get better and better.
<Start Rant>
You might be surprised at how many developers, when they see
lengthy posts (such as mine), just ignore them altogether, never responding at all -- seemingly being offended that anyone would even dare to think that their words could possibly be worthy of taking up
that much of the exalted developer's precious time. Or they stop after reading just the first sentence, treating the rest of the message as just so much "blah, blah, blah..." blather, then post a reply that totally misses the point. Or, they stop reading immediately when they first detect a note of criticism, raising their hackles and going into counterattack mode, never bothering to fully hear out the poster's comments.
In my opinion, the kind of arrogance described above is the main reason why most software today sucks. As it happens, I am a Ph.D. human factors psychologist -- an 'expert', if you will, in the psychology of usability. So I can tell you from experience that most developers and most software companies [
Hi there, Microsoft! ] are quite sure that they don't need any help with that, even though they've never actually studied this field. (Some companies pretend to care about usability, but what they actually do is hire graphic designers, not usability experts. 'Prettyifying' is
not the same thing as making it usable.)
Their reasoning, I suppose, is that since they are human themselves, they therefore automagically know how other humans will experience their software. (Or, if the other humans
don't experience their software in the expected way, then the other humans are obviously just too stupid to be using it in the first place.)
The developer apparently thinks that if his software makes perfect sense to himself, then it obviously should make perfect sense to the users (even though those users are not intimately familiar with it, not having been already deeply immersed in it for several months when they begin to use it).
Car mechanics don't assume that their customers ought to know everything that they know about their cars. Airline pilots don't assume that their passengers must be stupid if they don't know how to fly the plane. What
is it about software developers?
<End of rant>
P.S. I agree with you about the forum comment from Thomas above regarding notifications via the forum -- while yes, you should post important notifications to the forum, you cannot expect that every customer will register for the forum, much less that they'll be checking it daily. Setting up a by-subscription mailing list is also a good idea -- but for critically important events (such as with the 2.01 Final bug), a subscriber mailing list is also insufficient.
So, I think that preparing the ability to quickly notify all customers of a critically important event, via email, is the best idea.