User Feedback

I spent some of my free time over the past three weeks rebuilding a small single page app I maintain: Tumblr Top (code here).

The original incarnation of this app was written circa 2015 in CoffeeScript and AngularJS 1.4. The new version is in React and Semantic UI. There are also a few simple charts to visualize blog post and tag popularity that were coded using the Victory charting library.

I rewrote the app as an excuse to use React on a personal project and to make the site easier to build and maintain going forward. But the original version was running smoothly with something like 2-3k users per month. I didn’t want to upset the regular users by fixing what wasn’t broken.

So I built out the updated site to what I thought was a reduced but perhaps satisfactory level of functionality. I hosted the new app at a different url, and added a callout to the old site asking users to try it out.

While the new app was in-progress, I invited the early adopters to leave comments and criticism. Google Forms made soliciting and collecting user feedback dead simple (alternatives: SurveyMonkey or Typeform). The feedback survey was to the point. It only had four questions:

• Do you like the redesign?
• Do you miss the [missing feature]?
• Were there any errors or bugs with the redesign? (If so, please provide your browser / operating system)
• Any other feedback about the redesign or the app in general?

Over the course of a couple weeks the survey received 19 responses. This was enough to help me massively improve the first cut. The answers to those four questions gave me a lot of insight:

• The performance improvements I’d added had come at the cost of my API access often being rate-limited
• There was a critical display bug in a browser I hadn’t tested
• Other small bugs were highlighted
• Users had become very accustomed to what I thought were unimportant design details of the original version
• A feature I thought was useless was meaningful to a large percentage of users
• Strangers on the internet are willing to fill out a survey
• You can’t please everybody

I’m thankful to the handful of power users who took time out of their lives to provide valuable feedback for the app. Without that survey I may have shipped a shoddy update and degraded my users’ experience.