My current all-time favorite hobby is photography. Being a Web 2.0 guy, a large portion of the time I spend on this hobby and the enjoyment I get from it comes from sharing my pictures online as part of a community. For the past year or so, my photo sharing service of choice has been Zooomr. Last spring, Zooomr released Mark III, and said it would change the world. It was a very bumpy launch, the site was down for many days, and even now, many of the features we had in Mark II have yet to resurface.
Yet, I still stay with Zooomr, and so do many others. For every person however, there is a line past which they can't take it anymore, and will leave. Raoul Pop, a great photographer, longtime Zooomr advocate, and one of my "friends" on Zooomr has had nearly enough of the missing features and serious bugs that get promises instead of fixes, and that is why he is taking a break from Zooomr. If you read the comments of his post, you'll see that many other users are like minded, and unless something changes, Zooomr could be in trouble.
This blog is about finding bugs, but as Zooomr shows us, just knowing about the bugs is not enough. As testers, we can't just find a nice stack of bugs, then put our feet up on the desk, smoke a big cigar, and congratulate ourselves on a job well done. Instead, we have to make sure that these bugs get fixed.
What if there are no dedicated testers? In the case of Zooomr, the job of testing mostly falls to the user, since they have no QA staff, as far as I know. When quality is important, the tester serves as the first customer. When the customer serves as the first tester, there is a problem. A loyal user might tolerate bugs and missing features, report them, and even fight for the fixes. But most users aren't that loyal, and will instead just leave quitely.
When quality goes, so go the users. When the users go, so goes the company.
The point here is not to single out Zooomr as a company in trouble. Unlike Raoul, I'm not ready to take a break from Zooomr. At least not yet. Intead, this post should be read as a reminder, not just for Zooomr, but for all software companies, that the cost of not fixing bugs is usually much higher than the cost of fixing them.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
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2 comments:
Raoul was just ranting over a non-issue -- that being the way lightroom saves IPTC metadata in a fashion that is different from the rest of the pack.
I investigated how Adobe encapsulates their metadata inside of IPTC, made some changes to our uploading sub-system and now it works -- simple as. Raoul has my GTalk IM; He also knows that we have a help forum where we can talk about these issues as a community.
If you look at the photo post on Zooomr, that's where the real discussion takes place.
At the moment, we are working on launching Zooomr in Japan. Unfortunately, this also means that we must focus on making the Zooomr Japan experience friendly for Japanese people -- As the sole developer of Zooomr, I have to choose my time wisely.
In many ways, photo sharing is a costly venture -- in the greater interest of all of our users worldwide, I would rather have one user cry wolf over IPTC metadata than have 100,000 users crying over the loss of zooomr as a whole.
That said, of course I fixed his problem immediately -- Titles and descriptions now work well from lightroom to Zooomr.
Raoul is a good person -- but his points do not encapsulate the entire picture.
Thanks for posting about this.
kristopher tate
founder & cto -- zooomr
Thanks for your input, Kris. I understand that when deciding how to spend development resources, there will always be trade-offs, especially when you are a one man dev team.
I have every hope that you can find the right balance between keeping your existing users happy and attracting new users. You've done great things so far, and I for one will be sticking with you.
That being said, it is not wise to discount the feedback of Raoul and the others that chimed in on this. Passionate users are like gold, and if there is some "low-hanging fruit" you can offer them (such as the fix you made), then it is time well spent.
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