Bill W:
Chad G:
#2 of 10 in a series: Why Obvious App Improvements Don’t Get Made
It is easy to say that companies ignore users. It is much more useful to find cases where we can reconstruct what actually happened.
For this story, we want perhaps three to five exceptionally well-documented app failures or redesign controversies—cases where the record is rich enough to follow the problem from the user’s screen into the company’s decision-making process.
Sonos is one possible example. Snapchat and other major redesigns may provide others. But the company name is less important than the evidence.
For each case we want to know: what changed? What did users immediately experience? How quickly did complaints appear? What did management initially say? What internal goals or deadlines were driving the change? Which fixes came quickly, which took months, and what finally made the company reverse, apologize or change direction?
This is not intended as a collection of famous tech disasters for entertainment. The case studies are evidence for a broader investigation into why obvious app problems survive inside organizations that have talented engineers, extensive analytics and plenty of user feedback.
The strongest cases will let us distinguish several possibilities. Maybe management did not receive the problem clearly. Maybe it knew but believed another goal mattered more. Maybe internal metrics looked acceptable. Maybe the technical cost of reversing course was enormous. Or maybe the company simply misjudged how central an old workflow was to its users.
We will favor primary documents, executive statements, technical postmortems and detailed reporting over retrospective folklore.
The finished story should give readers something more useful than “company launches bad update; users angry.” It should show the anatomy of a product decision—from the moment it looked sensible inside the company to the moment the outside world made it impossible to defend.
