Yesterday I tweeted “Found a bug with my favorite piece of software #jing *cries* although in fairness it’s very minor and has an easy workaround”. Now Jing really is my favorite piece of software, I use it to show case good usability when I’m trying to get usability improvements done. The fact that I can take a screenshot, drop an arrow with some informational text on it, save it & have the path to the screenshot automatically copied to my clipboard to then paste into a bug report, all in less than 30 seconds! That’s usability!
Anyway enough about how much I enjoy this software, what really impressed me was only a couple of minutes after I’d tweeted this I got a reply, from Jing! “Uh-oh! What’s the bug? We don’t like workarounds–even if they’re easy. We’re in suspense 
”. Now that’s a company that cares about their image, I was impressed. I replied “@JingTips http://bit.ly/brVibh the jury is out, is it or isn’t it? Like I said minor 
”.
Now judge for yourself, technically it’s one of those defects that you don’t really know if it is or isn’t one. Personally I’m not sure myself. If there was a similar bug on my company’s software I’d have at least gotten a second opinion before deciding to raise it or not.
With the emergence of social monitoring applications such as Radian6 companies now have an excellent opportunity in being proactive by listening to what their customers have to say. Image is a big thing, we should all be promoting our companies image and be fully aware of it when we test. Be proactive; listen to what your customer has to say!
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Can’t agree more Darren. Twitter has emerged to become one of the sought customer service solution nowadays. Having reliable customer service response in Twitter — and other social networks in general — definitely raise image in front of customers.
Darren,
Great post. We have a tool designed for software testers. We hardly ever get such thoughtful messages from our tool’s users but we all absolutely love it when we do. A company would be foolish to ignore users who are as technically competent and helpful as you showed yourself to be. Unfortunately though, many companies seem to be pretty foolish about such things.
PS, your post on lean test case management / mind mapping was excellent too.
PPS, I use Jing on PCs and like it a lot but actually prefer Skitch on Macs. Both screen capture tools are great; Skitch is missing video capture.
- Justin
Justin,
Thanks for your comment, like you’d said your customers sell your application. It’s a socially interactive world now, marketing will only get you so far. Harness the power of your users, make them want to sell your product for you
Jing have a pretty decent idea going in providing a nearly complete tool, with minor perks on the pro version. If they’d take the 5 min time limit from video recording off the pro version I’d buy it in a second having used it & grown to love it.
Thanks for taking the time out to read some of my posts
Glad you enjoyed them.
Darren.