Wunderkind Fails Truth In Advertising 101

I think that companies should be as truthful as possible, and when customers point out inaccuracies in marketing materials the company should fix the issue.

Case in point: Wunderkind — the company behind the Wunderlist task manager app — has the following image and text on their website:

Which gives the impression that the tool supports something like sticky notes, widely understood as standalone notes that emulate real world post-its.

But what Wunderlist actually implements in completely different: each task in Wunderlist has a single note. Or turned around, the only notes in Wunderlist are embedded in tasks: they aren’t anything like sticky notes. Here’s an image of a Wunderlist note, embedded in a task:

Note that notes can be popped out of the task, for editing or viewing, but only temporarily. They aren’t sticky notes.

When users comment (or complain) about this inaccuracy (or falsehood) the support staff’s answers are lame.

Demonstration purposes? Demonstration of how sticky notes work in other apps?

If your implementation of notes is better than sticky notes then stop pushing the idea of sticky notes, and put up an image of what you actually have.

Wunderkind — it’s time to fix your app or your website, or both. 

Yes, I know the app is free, but people’s time isn’t. I took a look at your new Wunderlist 2 today, and fully expected sticky notes. Now, I’m an analyst, so no real problem, but I bet that for every person that posted a note on your support about this — and I only picked out three — there could be hundreds that are pissed off, and didn’t contact you. They just stopped using your app, and told their buddies it’s a piece of junk.

This is just like the restaurant with cold food and bad service where the patrons don’t all complain, they just never come back.

PS If you actually implemented sticky notes — freeform notes outside of tasks but associated with projects, and having their own comment threads — I’d consider using your product, because it’s one of the features missing from Asana that I would really like to have.

14 February 2013 5 Permalink

Asana Has Outage, Falls Into Programmer Speak In Explanation

I received email from Asana, the San Francisco-based work media company, making apologies for an email outage. Most interesting is the possible confusion in their explanation when they fall into progeammer speak, and begin to refer to the Asana program as ‘we’:

via email

Over this weekend — from 10:28AM Pacific on Friday until 1:30PM Pacific today — we had an error where we did not process any replies to task notification emails, or incoming emails to x@mail.asana.com. We are very sorry for this outage and we are taking steps to prevent this from happening again.

If you sent any emails to Asana during the outage, you can resend them to have them processed correctly:
1. Search your sent mail for “to:mail.asana.com”
2. For any mails in that search sent between 10:28 AM PDT on 8/12 and 1:30PM PDT on 8/15, copy and resend the emails

If you need any help whatsoever with this process, please don’t hesitate to email us at support@asana.com and we’ll get back to you right away.

Asana takes reliability very seriously, and customers’ ability to trust us with your data will obviously be critical to your success with the product and our success as a business. In general we have made significant strides in improving the robustness of all of our systems over the last quarter, and are on our way toward parity with other services whose reliability you depend on. We will take this incident seriously as an opportunity not only to ensure that we prevent all future problems with bad code disabling incoming email (details below), but also to look even more closely at each part of our system.

We apologize for this incident, and greatly appreciate your patience as our practices evolve. If you have any questions about this bug, about the recovery instructions above, or about reliability in general, please email us at support@asana.com.

Sincerely,
Dustin Moskovitz
Asana


Here’s what happened:
1. We pushed what we thought was an unrelated change to make Asana work on Chrome Frame in Internet Explorer.
2. This change accidentally caused us to think that our mail server was an invalid browser.
3. Our servers rejected all of the incoming emails instead of processing them.
4. The mail server interpreted the invalid browser response as a success message and did not log any errors.

Here’s how we’ll prevent things like this from happening in the future:
1. We are adding integration tests that will prevent code that breaks incoming email from being pushed to production in the future.
2. We are adding end-to-end tests that will monitor our production environment for any sudden decreases to incoming emails so that we will detect any problems with incoming email much more quickly.

I am betting that when they wrote ‘This change accidentally caused us to think that our mail server was an invalid browser’ they meant ‘This change accidentally caused the Asana program to think that the Asana mail server was an invalid browser’.

In general, it’s better to not anthropomorphize about programs this way, because it becomes very confusing to non programmers who don’t parse the world like that,

16 August 2011 1 Permalink