The first part of this article can be found here.
Your product is just awful
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Unfortunately, such things happen. The user uninstalls your product and then for some time vents frustrations about “this frob” in various social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Some time ago I wrote about how it is possible to estimate the product from the emotional point of view and measure its attractiveness. That is why I won’t go deep in psychology in this article and will be brief. |
I communicate with our users and I am a user of other software products. This feeling appears in two cases:
Firstly, very often users complain on the great amount of errors that don’t allow working with the product quite reasonably. Just imagine that your product throws an “Unhandled Exception” window every five minutes and doesn’t save the changes. Imagined? Will you use such a product? Or will you uninstall it after several failures?
Secondly, the users are often frustrated with the non-standard behavior of the product. For example, text editor closes the document instead of saving it upon pressing Ctrl+S. Or it doesn’t offer you to save the document when switching to the other mode like the SSRS Report Builder 2008 did (if anyone faced “this feature” he will understand what I am talking about).
And finally, the greatest problem is when the vendors don’t think about the users. I’ve got a favorite feature on the public services portal (that is quite helpful in most cases) that perfectly illustrates such approach.
Have anyone of you transferred quite a long history of your professional life from the work record card to the form filled to get an international passport? Do you remember session that expires in 15 minutes and it is necessary to re-login to the system and all data you have already entered is lost? I think this system is created for students who don’t work anywhere or computer geeks who master in 22-finger touch typing. Do you agree that this is just awful?
So, if your product is horrible look for the source of this horror immediately and fix it. Otherwise, it will go to the trash along with your effort, 1 year of your life, cubic meters of coffee, tens of burning eyes and investor money by the way.
What to do?
“Everyone can analyze and show off intelligence”, you would say and will be absolutely right. “You better tell me what to do!”
So, what to do when your product is uninstalled by 995 of 1000 users.
Look at users who download the product
Analyze users who download your product carefully . What are the referrers? What search keywords lead to your website? If you haven’t set Google Analytics, do it right now!
Taking these factors in mind, you will be able to understand if your website visitors are your target audience, people you are waiting for.
For example, if you sell accounting systems and 1000 visitors came to you from the banner on the porn website, 5 stable users is just a huge conversion rate for such low quality traffic.
If you are getting non-target visitors from the wrong referrers, it means that this is not your product that is awful, but its promotion and marketing. Form relevant search keywords; think about promotion on the industry-specific websites where your target audience resides. In other words think on the efficient internet marketing (it’s even better to hire a professional team if you’ve still got any budget).
If visitors came from the resources you planed, you need to understand what they expect. That is why you need to get feedback from them.
Getting feedback
| To my mind, one of the most important moments is getting feedback. And getting it from those 5 users working with your product will be much easier. We use questionnaires. We ask to fill it not for free, but for a gift. This is usually an Amazon certificate. A gift depends of the budget we have, on the amount of respondents and on how much the respondent is valuable. We announce gifts of 10-25 USD value depending on the answer. |
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It’s important to carefully think over the questionnaire content. Ask the questions you want to get the answers to. The clearer the questions are the more helpful answers you will get. Note that people usually don’t have much time and your 15 USD will be just a pleasant small point. We use the following questionnaire for existing users and the following questionnaire for those who refused purchasing the license.
Statistics show that only 3-5% of the users participate in such research. Just be ready to such figures.
Besides, we use one more option to get the feedback. When the product is uninstalled the user sees a dialog that offers to choose a reason for uninstall: installation of a new version, missing feature (with the ability to specify it), etc. This information is recorded in our database and we analyze it from time to time. Just don’t forget that many users will just check the first variant; that is why you need to set there something hardly probable and then just ignore this variant.
By the way, if a user activated the product by entering his name and email, you can easily follow up him and try to find out why the product was uninstalled. Of course this is not working with every user, but it works in general.
And the last way to get feedback is to send error messages automatically. You can, for example, add all unhandled exceptions to the email message and offer your users to send them to the server. Thus, you will get quite detailed information on how frequent the error occurs. It’s unnecessary to say that no private information should be sent in this case.
Let’s try once again
Based on the feedback, you can understand why users need your product, how they want to use it and why they didn’t manage to do it. Draw conclusions, use different models, look for markets, and focus on unique features.
Try different niches and different variants. At last, try to develop another product. 
The main point is to move where you decided to go to!
Wish you successful products and high conversion rates!
