Today (14th of July) I am glad because i downloaded all reviews with the Appviz tool in order to see if any of the couple hundred users of my app posted a review comment to the iTunes store. Against what i thought in the beginning, not many users do this. I don’t blaim them, i found myself doing it only a couple of times too, and only with apps that made my toes tingle (no I didn’t review my own app..).

But – as i was saying – today i got my first review in iTunes. Too bad it is negative about both the App and my service. But, instead of getting angry or thinking of wrongs of wrights of the review I decided to analyse it’s contents and plan actions to prevent other people to get the same customer experience as this reviewer had.

The reviewer himself is not named here because it is his very good right to publish his experience as feedback into iTunes. Rather, i’d just like to thank him for taking the time and giving me solid sound feedback which i can use to do my very best.

The review

So, let’s take a look at the review. After that i will take it apart and share my thoughts and actions for it.

Although it claims that it’s so easy to set up, after downloading, restarting my iPhone 3GS and after even looking for more instructions on the eekay.com website, I found there no further instructions than the skimpy ones listed on the iTunes app page.. When I tried their online chat support, no one was there, even though it was about noon on the west coast. When I tried to edit the new group list I made up, I found contacts from other groups showing up. The purpose of the “labels” is not explained although it wouldn’t allow one to proceed without using them. Don’t buy this–I wasted $1.99.

And now you’ve red the feedback, let’s take this baby apart:

Although it claims that it’s so easy to set up, after downloading, restarting my iPhone 3GS and after even looking for more instructions on the eekay.com website, I found there no further instructions than the skimpy ones listed on the iTunes app page..

After reading this part, i am wondering if the easy to set up part is too subjective to use as a statement. Since many people download it and i get more positive feedback than bad (by mail) i hope that the app proves itself on this matter even though this user didn’t experience my app as “easy to set up”. Furthermore, the instructions have proven too limited for everyone to get the idea of the app.
My action: I will take these points into account and create a simple manual of the application which describes the setup steps one-by-one and shows how things like labels and groups are usedin iGroupEmail, and what they mean.

When I tried their online chat support, no one was there, even though it was about noon on the west coast.

After looking at the site of the team behind Battery Go!, I found myself chatting with one of the three creators because he was just online that moment. They implemented the hab.la online chat script that enables site-owners to chat with visitors in a realtime fashion using iChat (or another Jabber-enabled client). I thought this was so cool i installed it on this website as well.
Thanks to this review i now know that when you put features like that on your website, you can create the idea that supporting staff will be online from nine-till-five. I created an “always reachable” image; one i cannot live up to. I am a solo iPhone developer with another dayjob so my support (and customer interaction) is mostly done by mail. When i’m online and so is a user, it is possible that some nice realtime interaction can take place via the hab.la feature but primarely, it’s my mail that will be the communication channel.
My action: I instantly changed my offline and busy messages that are shown in the hab.la chat feature into a solid text that points to the form on the Contacts page. It sends me a mail with the user feedback and points visitor’s to my main interaction channel: email.

When I tried to edit the new group list I made up, I found contacts from other groups showing up.

Seems to me like this is a problem with the Contacts database on the device. I once had this type of thing on my Macbook but never on my iPhone. If trouble like this occurs i hope the next person will send a mail. Only by answering questions and clearly describing what the symptoms are, i will be able to fix this type of thing.
My action: For this issue, and some questions asked by customers, i will setup a Q&A page for iGroupEmail. Hopefully that will make people clear they can always email me about issues and that i will do my very best to solve them. Unfortunately some questions may be returned before i have enough info to get me going on the bugfixing.

The purpose of the “labels” is not explained although it wouldn’t allow one to proceed without using them.

My action: as explained above; i need to make clear the concept of the app and explain any terms used.

Don’t buy this–I wasted $1.99.

Too bad that a user of my appliation has reached this conclusion. I will do my best to help anyone with issues on something i created. Although $1.99 is not much, it IS too much when the advertised functionality did not work. And i don’t mean “doesn’t work out”, but technically not working. If i build (and Apple delivers) it should do it’s job for every single buyer out there.
My action: If the perception of what the application does is not clear or different from your experience on how to use my application, i urge any buyers out there to tell me. I will take your info on this matter seriously and try to improve the iTunes text or any texts on my domain (www.eekay.nl).

I expect to have all actions ready within a week (milestone 21th of July).

Last but not least, I hope that anyone who has bought iGroupEmail will have a great time using it, and keep giving me direct and true feedback (be it using mail or iTunes feedback) from their experiences. It being compliments, suggestions or critisism. Because only through honest feedback i will be able to improve any application that i will develop.

With regards,

Edwin Klesman

Email : info@eekay.nl
WwW : www.eekay.nl

mniE : www.mynameise.com/eekay
YT : www.youtube.com/eekayonline
Twitter : www.twitter.com/eekayonline

Head over and get yours at eekayonline.spreadshirt.com (international)
or eekayonline.spreadshirt.net (Dutch)!

(or click on one of the images below)

In order to make myself known to the do’s and don’t i decided to check out if a repetitive, pushy approach -which, via mail would most definitely lead to being marked as annoyance (or worse: Spammer) – would do me bad in Twitterland. I mean, i know that the message stack will not erase itself, but with the followers being under a 1000 persons this kind of checking out might be worth the try.

I decided to start a poll on twtpoll.com with the question “What would make you review an iPhone App”. Chances are good that you’ve seen this fly by if you’re an iPhone developer too. I started broadcasting my poll(http://twtpoll.com/hgv5o0), wondering what the type and amount of response would be like. Below are my findings on this little experiment..

Day one -28th of April

• Status: Created my poll today
• Approach: Sent the poll using twtpolls standard settings. After a time i sent out the message a couple of times again, this time using #channels
• Feedback: 1 vote

i don’t know why, but i thought it would be raining feedback from the skies. I had about 230 followers and i thought “at least a dozen of them would respond, being busy Twitterers and all”.. Wrong.

I think it’s because it isn’t a direct (person to person) medium that there was no response. No one feels (and should be) obligated to answer your questions.

Twitter is about voluntarily replying, and doing so with fun and interaction in mind. Not filling out boring polls or blattering boring stuff..

After a few days after start- 30th of April

• Status: Not much replies, changing of tactics today
• Approach: instead of just spamming the Twitterair and #-quoted channels (the few i knew of) i wanted to make things more interesting. I didn’t have much feedback (3 votes I believe), i wanted to stimulate people more using nice tweets to “lure” them into answering.
• Feedback: ~10 votes

I was happy to see, that the instant i changed simply tweeting the question along with the poll’s url into creating mind-tingling questions like “would you want hard cash or is a promo code enough to do a review? tell me at:[link here]” or “s it dirty old’ green mony, or just a favour? what would put you up to it? [link here]” got the poll some attention.
I like to think this (little) succes has to do with the fact that Twittering is to the web, what Headlines are to a newspaper. Stimulating sentences that make one want to know more. In Twitter’s case, more about the person behind it, and what else that person’s got to say (or said).

People don’t want boring lines of text, thay want everlasting phrases that make them laugh, triggered and stimulated. Be stimulating.

At the end of the poll – 5th of May

• Status: No world representative results, but a good feeling anyway
• Approach: Today, the poll comes to an end, and so does this little experiment. The last two days i used the Tweets i sent to promote my poll at some of the biggest #channels.. i found out that there’s a site called wefollow.com. You can subscribe yourself as following three channels. But it also is a good source of looking into what channels are available, and how many are following that channel. 
  I used this info to send my polls along to some most popular channels (although i checked that there was relevance between my poll question and the channel)
• Feedback:  just a few more

Thinks end with my poll being filled out with not much more than a dozen answers, but i liked the fact that i found out that there are popular channels, to which one could tweet. Using this source of information didn’t lead to a flood of answers to my poll though.
It DID lead to my followersban growing from ~220 to ~268 followers in about a day.Thats a 22% increase of my followers! The traffic to my site got a peak as well! I can only conclude from this, that although the poll didn’t make people push a button, the kind of tweeting i used made people interested in me. Niiiiiice..

But it’s not just all good news

After getting a reply of a Twitterer with whome i’ve interacted a few times, asking me to stop this poll advertising, i was happy to conclude that in fact even Twitterland has its borders. Don’t be of an annoyance and retweet the same thing over and over.
Although my followers increased, i also lost a few followers. Even followers who wished me best of luck with my new ideas etc.

I will never know how they think of this experiment (unless Twitterland makes them come back), and I can only hope i haven’t replaced interested followers with new ones that aren’t into my “personal interest group”.

If you want to repeat your statement, wrap it into new tweets and be creative, not repetitive.

Conclusion

This experiment is at it’s end. I will tweet my story and hope that many will ook into it and get something usefull out of its content. But i understand now, that if these words don’t reach far, thats okay too. I won’t put a blame on Twitter, since i now understand it’s nature more. I know that you either have to be very popular or very creative (which can make you very popular so there’s really just one game here ) in order to let  your words reach many people.

Most of all, I learned from all of this I need to think of WHAT i want to state. Then, before tweeting it, I need to think of HOW i’m going to tweet.
And that, dear reader, isn’t all that different from what we know from times before computers even existed; Verbal communication….

…and yes, Twitter IS a socialized medium

A nice resource link for information about twittering can be found here.

ps: hope i didn’t asocialize myself in this fine medium

ps2: the poll’s results:

twtpoll results

You can visit the  new YouTube home as well: http://www.youtube.com/user/EeKayOnline

Have fun viewing!

After launching my first iPhone App (see the Products page for more info), i figured it was time to move on from a simple personal blog to a more complete website with product info, interactive polls and insights in my projects. This site features information on what i released, what i am doing and gives just that extra info one could need about my Apps.

My personal blog is still there, and i’ll post stuff up there from time to time. You can find it using this url:  me.eekay.nl

Because the naming was a key factor in marketing any iPhone App, i renamed iGrodis to GroupMail; a neat and simple name to enlighten the core functionality. Too bad that i got an email soon after that, stating that the name was a registered trademark. So the final renaming led to its current name: iGroupEmail.

At first, iGroupEmail was targeted at December 2008 (because of mass communication that takes place in that month) i had to let this target go because of delayes and setbacks during development. My second target was the last week of January 2009. I Developed everything but because of a technical bug Apple rejected my application.

I decided to take the correct approach and analyzed my coding from scratch on and tested my App  in full extend. I spent weeks on this. Precious time was being spent, but it was worth it: on 21 of March 2008, i got the email from Apple stating: “Ready for Sale”.

Since then dozens of people have bought iGroupEmail and used it without any complaints! Apsolutely stunning

Are you interested in iGroupEmail? Check out its Product page and view info, screenshots and featured videos to get your mind on it!

Although my visitor numbers aren’t that special i DO like to share you where the people that do visit are viewing from. So here it is: the Google Analytics map overlay and the Top 10 list.

That there may be more nozy people putting their nose on my website in the near future!

Google Analytics Map overlay 29th of April, 2009.(click to enlarge)

Google Analitics Ranking 29th of april 2009