Developers have multiple opportunities to publicly engage with their users, whether it’s through reviews in the Google Play Store, public beta and alpha channels, or through social media. But sometimes these interactions create situations that are more fraught than necessary, and these moments can lead to features that users say they want, but then don’t use. In this session, I will use The New York Times as a case study for how to interact with users in public forums, showing you how to leverage this two-way relationship to increase their satisfaction with your apps. I will also dive into ways that developers can translate user feedback into an understanding of core user needs, helping you build more effective solutions to their reported problems and feature requests.

1. Managing User Feedback:
Setting Expectations and
Translating Feedback into
Features
Modupe Akinnawonu
Product Manager
The New York Times

2. +
About Me

3. What you’ll get from this talk
• Why you should care about your public
contact with users
• How to approach interacting with those users
• Tips for figuring out what to build based on
user input

4. Interacting with users in public

5. Android team’s public communication at NYT

6. Why should you care?

7. Brand: Great Example from Slack

8. Insights (we’ll come back to this)

9. Let’s talk about users

10. OECD study of computer skills, 2011-2015

11. OECD study of computer skills, 2011-2015
Strong tech skills =
Only 5-8% of Adults
• Can define goals based on
implicit criteria
• Can overcome unexpected
challenges
• Can evaluate information and
disregard irrelevant details
Source: http://bit.ly/2ewSBbq

12. You are not your users, no
matter how technical your
users are.

13. How to manage criticism in
public

14. Assume users are operating in good faith
USER: “Please bring back night mode on the app. I use the app less
and less because of it.”

15. Troubleshoot without condescension
NYT: “. . . we’re sorry to hear about the crash. Does it happen when
you tap share? Are you tapping share from inside the article or . . .”

16. Be curious about your users
NYT: “We’d be interested in hearing more details on how you feel
about what is ranked in Top Stories.”

17. Be curious about your users
NYT: “We’d love to learn more about the improvements you’d like to see in
the app . . . please send an email to android+playstore@nytimes.com.”

18. Apologize when you’re wrong
NYT: “Hi everyone - we’re really sorry about the updating issues some of
you are having.”

19. Be as honest as possible
NYT: “Unfortunately the reason why this not working is that NYT Cooking
doesn’t have a native equivalent on Android right now . . .”

20. Address criticism, even when you can’t do
much about it right now
USER: “Great app but too many ads for a paid subscription service.
Please reduce the number of ads.”

21. Don’t feed the trolls
USER: “Extremely biased app, the failing new york times is FAKE
NEWS!”

22. How do you figure out what your
audience wants?

23. Remember, statistics only tell part of the story
“NIGHT MODE IS MISSING!
NEED IT!”
“Please bring back night mode. The twilight mode is
pretty pointless.”

24. Understand your demographics
The Expert The Casual Browser The Novice

25. Talk to your users!
You can find them among:
• Users who contact customer service
• Forums
• Your vendors
• Your co-workers (as a proxy)
• Friends and family

26. Ask why before you build, then ask why again
USER ASK: We’d like a way to remove all images from the
section fronts of the Android app.
REAL PROBLEM: The app is having data management issues
and is using far too much of it to download assets.
SOLUTION: Stop downloading photos with background updates,
and give users the option of only downloading images over wifi.

27. Thank You!
Questions?
modupe [dot] akinnawonu [at] nytimes [dot] com
@ModupeAkin