Will Shipley posted an anecdote about Steve Jobs on Twitter. It starts with this tweet:
I feel like people don’t get why Steve Jobs was ultimately so successful. It wasn’t because of his huge ego or because he could be a complete jerk. It wasn’t because of his incredible charisma, although that helped.
Will Shipley. (2020, July 11). Twitter. https://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/1282098099997954048
Please, follow that link to see the whole story. (Twitter will automatically show his thread.)
I don’t have any Steve Jobs stories. I never met him, though I once emailed him a passionate plea to start using breakaway connectors for power on laptops. He didn’t reply, but MagSafe was introduced a couple of years later. I’m sure I’m not the only one who asked, but I’m still glad he listened to users in aggregate.
I strongly believe that a good product is used by its creators and those creators stay in touch with the people that use the product. It’s only in daily use that we uncover the flaws in our products. I know of problems in BeLooped that no more than a handful of people in the world have experienced, and they’re on my list for fixing.
One example is the performance on Android. For whatever reason, our Android programmer wasn’t testing it with a large number of groups. He just wasn’t in a lot of groups. It took Chris and I running it with many groups to determine how slow it could be. We’re now testing the Android client with much larger data sets, and while it will be a while before it performs as well as we’d like we’ve made a lot of improvements.
Another example was on iOS. Every now and then, the forum history would disappear for a user. We had very few reports on this, and no leads that could be reasonably pursued. Because we use the software ourselves so frequently, we were eventually able to notice enough details to find and solve the problem. (It was really complicated, involving a perfect mismatch of several conditions.)
We’ve got more changes requested by users coming, too. We’ve also got a long list of things we want the software to do that will help users, too.