The importance of not annoying your users
Twitter’s recent acquisition of leading iPhone client Tweetie (along with hiring its developer for their mobile team) was certainly a minor surprise for those users who follow the behind the scenes events in the industry.
For those users who aren’t so involved with the behind the scenes machinations, the first they would have heard about it was upon installing Tweetie’s 2.1.2 update. Besides a small collection of bug fixes, the main focus was on a so-called surprise – which turned out to be a little heads-up to users notifying them of the impending rebranding of Tweetie as the Twitter for iPhone application.
As I see it, this is where things didn’t go as smooth – sometime after the release, I started to see a number of users on my timeline complain about not being able to deactivate it. At this point, I hadn’t given a thought to disabling it either (having worked out what to do to avoid activating it) until this started happening. A quick cursory glance through its Settings screen was enough to find the necessary option to disable it from appearing.
This is where I happened to get a little grumpy.
Not because of the Easter Egg, but rather for the fact that why didn’t any of the complaining users dive into the settings before complaining? Is this simply an artefact of settings for iPhone applications being stored in an external application (though, the number of new applications doing this is somewhat decreasing)? Or is this down to users not being interested in customising the application?
The other question which was floating around my head was what about the Easter Egg upon discovery? Unlike other Easter Eggs (for example the hidden games inside earlier versions of Microsoft Excel & Word), this Easter Egg was really only meant to be seen the once. Thus, I would have believed that upon discovery, the most logical thing to do would be to automatically disable this.
The fact that it’s disabled via a simple UI switch would suggest that it’s the best option, but sadly this wasn’t the case.
What lessons can a developer take away from this? First & foremost would be the value in not pissing off your end users. The fact that the Easter Egg didn’t switch off upon being discovered was a serious lack of foresight, only compounded by the lack of discovery being performed by the user.
The second thing to take away would be considering a better way to managed any such notifications. Had I been implementing such a feature, I probably would have gone & presented it as a simple banner when the application had been started up for the first time. That way, I would have been able to have it appear on screen for a short period of time, before disappearing.
Regardless of how it was put in, I personally liked the feature & felt that it was a great way to notify users of the impending rebranding. I guess I just believe that in this case, it could have been executed in a way which didn’t annoy the end user.