Rather than pick another whinge from IRC or Twitter from a fellow developer and risk alienating the entire Mac developer community, I am using an example of feedback for my own product, Differencia.

The following information was just submitted via the DayTime Software Internet site Contact form.

First Name: John

Last Name: Dontwantoleavemyname

Telephone Number:

Email Address: fakeemail@yahoo.com

Message:
Your program is difficult to use and confusing. Take a look at standard “diff” programs for text. This program should emulate those, because that is what users are already used to, and the programs work well. Instead, you’ve created a whole different paradigm that just left me scratching my head. Templates? Okay–a great option. But what if I don’t have a template or don’t want to bother with one? Plus, the program crashed several times on me. This needs a lot of work if you’re going to sell it.

There was no way for me to respond as no valid contact information was left. Others might complain that he did not “get” my product, or that his feedback was very unconstructive. In fact that was my first response as well, and tweeted as much.

The main point is that Differencia is not a “standard diff program”. It is intended to work with data files that standard diff programs cannot handle. A new paradigm, as he puts it, was required as other diff programs simply cannot handle the use cases that Differencia was intended for.

However I have gone back to deconstruct the feedbacl, to try and understand how he failed to understand the product.

The lessons I learnt are:

• I have optimised the site for search terms that include “diff”. This is precisely to attract people looking for diff programs that handle exceptional cases. However I do not stress heavily on the site that Differencia does not (currently) handle non-structured text files such as source code or documents.
• I have not, perhaps, emphasised enough on the site that Templates are a convenience but not a requirement for Differencia to work well.
• I have not done enough testing with source code and other file types to ensure that they do not trigger crashes.
• Not a new lesson, but I know that I need to do a mix of usability improvements and add tutorials to the website / product

Instead of bemoaning hyper-critical feedback and how useless it is, I have taken stock, assumed there is something I can learn and improve on, and worked hard to gather something positive from the feedback.