Listening To Users.

Listening To Users.

How a basic app taught me what it means.

Don’t try to control how users use your app.

Couple of months ago, I built an Android App with my conspirator Muhammad Ali. The premise was simple based on two principles:

1) Text messaging still plays a big part of our lives despite the fancy smartphones we we all carry around in your our pockets. But text messages are perishable.

2) The both him and I used to get text messages from our parents every time we were out of the house to get something on our way home.

The problem — I read the text message and I would forget. Text messages cant be as marked as unread (which is something I love doing in Gmail whenever there is something I want to respond to or work on later)

So we created BringList- a simple app that creates a sticky notification in your android task bar whenever you get a message that starting with Bring followed by items. For example Bring eggs,milk butter bread etc. would tell BringList to make a list of items containing eggs, milk & butter.The fun (or annoying) part is that until you go into the app and delete every item one by one the notification wont go away. The assumption was that every time you looked at your phone screen you would see a tiny B in the corner always reminding you got you got some items to bring/grab or buy. That in theory would force you to go into the app and check the items.

Remembrance by Repetition.

We launched with a very early version to validate our assumption and we got some downloads (150 at last count) and we were satisfied enough to consider doing a V-2.

But then something surprising happened. We had built this app strictly or ‘grocery’ purposes but a friend of mine emailed me saying how he loved to use BringList a a as a to-do list app.

What! What? To- Do list? That wasn't our intended purpose. It is so far from what we thought was our core use case that we didn't even consider it.

What he does is text himself all the items he needs to do for the day. E.g Bring Finish marking papers, work on research paper, grab groceries,email X etc — He is a professor so his to-do list probably revolves more around research and marking then mine.

We or at least I did not see that coming. BringList wasn't designed for that purpose but my friend was tired of using overcomplicated to-do apps (I have to ask him if he used Any.Do) so he simply re-purposed the app to fit is his need for a simple to-do app. No fancy reminders, no fancy UI. Just a simple text message.

This was interesting enough to set about to re-work the app to support this a little more. Texting yourself “Bring” while you want to “Do” isn't very elegant.

The point of this story — we all hear this all the time in blogs and talks by success full founders. Always be listening to your users. But this was the first time in my limited experience with startups that I had actually been surprised or really understood the depth of the simple statement ‘listen to your users’ — albeit the user in question is a close friend and he was happy enough to tell me. Alot of people wont bother telling you what they do or what they don’t like unless you ask nicely or one can always utilize analytic tools like MixPanel and create custom events.