The Real Cost of App Unavailability—and How to Avoid It
With any impending holiday or shopping season, one of main things product companies watch out for is for their application’s availability, given the peak loads they anticipate from end-users. A lot of attention is given to performance and availability to ensure the app is responsive, reliable, and secure.
Availability is often associated with load, but not necessarily with overall functionality and compatibility. With the number of apps flooding the marketplace, these other parameters are becoming increasingly important to consider. While developing apps, especially for mobile platforms, has become a more common skill developers are adding to their resumes, even a small glitch can tarnish the name of an app, regardless of how well established it already is in the marketplace.
Users sometimes get to know about these glitches even before the support staff from the product team is given an opportunity to act and fix them. For example, in Twitter’s latest issue with its login, before Twitter even addressed the problem the word about the app’s unavailability had spread. And from what is known about the issue, it seemed to be more compatibility-related, not performance-related, but users had already heard about the failure.
If even such large names can take a dent from unavailability, the smaller ones obviously need to be just as careful in ensuring their quality. The other aspects to consider are how quickly an outage is addressed when one does occur, and how well the end-users are appeased and assured that such an issue will not happen again.
It is becoming essential for quality and support teams to take certain proactive steps in addition to their internal quality checks and balances. For instance, it is a good idea to have them monitoring user forums to gather and act on feedback even before a complaint is officially logged as a bug. A faster turnaround helps mitigate the impact of an issue significantly. Keeping tabs on these forums is also useful for looking at trends, complaints, and even positive experiences, so the team can try to give the app a better chance in winning users’ loyalty.
Both development and post-development support have become tightly coupled with the end-user. A successful product is not necessarily the one that has been developed well; it is one that is tested well from varied attributes, is closely monitored after release, and is quickly and completely supported in case of an issue.
Building the right teams to take care of all these end-user requirements is becoming imperative in today’s larger product development landscape.
