Setting User Expectation

Thu, 28 May 2009 15:31:00 -0400

Building an app on top of Twitter is really exciting - the community, the ideas, and oh, right, the service that’s usually up and very responsive but occasionally has its issues. It’s easy to complain about Twitter’s uptime and performance, but as a tech guy, I can at least imagine the challenges that they’re up against. Our job as developers is to mitigate this uncertainty and give our users the best experience possible.

So, what have we learned? Users can understand that Twitter is down. It’s frustrating, but it’s understandable. Cell phones drop calls all the time. If you’re going directly to Twitter.com, you get immediate feedback that something’s wrong in these situations. For 3rd-party applications like CoTweet that provide layers of insulation around it, though, it’s often more difficult for users to get that direct feedback.

Enter the status bubble. In CoTweet we provide real-time status notification when something goes awry in communicating with Twitter. We have internal reports about our application layer request failure rates and a number of external monitoring tools that help us understand the state of things. A simple trick: keep a Twitter search for “ sucks” running. When the API starts to fail, people blame the tools first because of this exact problem. Once we’ve identified the issue, we provide immediate feedback in our UI until the issue has been resolved.

We’ve found that users are generally very happy to learn that they’re not crazy and that their computers aren’t broken. Setting user expectations, even if they’re less than ideal, results in a better end-user experience.

@gotwalt

CoTweet Tech

Setting User Expectation