enjoyebooks Chapter 470, First Batch of User Feedback
Chapter 470, First Batch of User Feedback
On the fifth day after the company went public, Chen Zhongming walked into Lingyun's office carrying a laptop.
"User feedback has been received."
Ling Yun was signing a stack of expense reports, not even looking up, when he said, "Speak."
Chen Zhongming turned on his computer; the screen displayed the customer service system backend. Complaints and suggestions were already categorized, with three red markers at the top—high priority.
"Overall, it's alright. The touch is smooth, the screen colors are good, the camera is better than expected, and although the app store doesn't have many items, they are all quite good. There are three main drawbacks: the battery life is not long enough, it can't last a day even with heavy use; there are too few apps; and there are occasional crashes, which are not frequent but the conditions for recurrence are very random."
Ling Yun put down his pen. "What about the specific data?"
"Battery life is the most frequent complaint, accounting for about 40%. Some users say they left home fully charged in the morning, and the battery was already low by 3 pm. Others say that after turning on navigation, the battery drops faster than a thermometer." Chen Zhongming flipped down a page. "We've received over two hundred reports of app crashes. Wang Jianguo and his team are already investigating, and they initially suspect it's a problem with the memory reclamation mechanism. As for the number of apps, there's nothing we can do but accumulate them slowly."
Ling Yun stood up and walked to the window. "Regarding battery life, have Li Mo readjust the power management strategy. First, reduce the background refresh frequency, and put the GPS module into sleep mode when not in use. As for app crashes—" He turned around, "When can Jian Guo give us the results?"
He said before he left work today.
Show it to me before you leave work.
Chen Zhongming jotted down two notes in his notebook, then looked up and said, "There's something else. An article went viral online yesterday."
"What article?"
Chen Zhongming turned the computer around. On the screen was a long forum post titled "My StarPhone's First Week," with the author's ID being a string of letters and numbers. The post was very long, requiring several pages to scroll down to the bottom.
Ling Yun dragged a chair over and sat down, starting to read from the beginning.
"I received the phone on December 10th, and my hands were shaking when I unpacked it. It's not that I've never seen a new phone before, it's that I've never seen a phone like this. The boot animation only lasts for three seconds, and after that, you're on the home screen with a clock on it, and the second hand of the clock is moving."
"I basically played with the touch screen on the first day. I swiped and pinched, and I played the unlock sound effect at least fifty times. My roommate said, 'Are you crazy?'"
"I started using it seriously the next day. I used it to take notes in class, using Hanwang input method to write by hand. The recognition speed was faster than I expected. Before, when I used a keypad phone to type, I could only write three lines in a class. Now I can write a whole page. My calculus teacher saw me writing on the screen and came over to look at it for a long time after class, asking, 'Is this a handwriting tablet?' I said it was a phone. He didn't believe me."
"I used it to browse forums on the third day. Lying on the top bunk at night, I held it up with one hand and swiped to turn pages with the other. UCWEB's night mode is very comfortable, and the screen brightness is not glaring even at the lowest setting. When I used to browse forums with my Nokia, I could only see six lines per page, and I had to press the button seven times to turn the page. Now I can just swipe down, and how can I describe that feeling? I just can't go back."
"On the fourth day, I chatted with my girlfriend using StarPhone. She was still using a Nokia, and I told her to get a StarPhone, but she said it was too expensive. I said she could use mine for now, and she played with it for one night. The next day, she told me that she was going to save up to buy one."
Ling Yun chuckled upon seeing this.
There are a few more paragraphs. He describes using WPS to write his final paper outline on his phone, how he discovered a small game called Snake in the app store and the whole dorm took turns playing it for an entire class period, and his surprise when he received a system update notification and found the crashing issue fixed. The last paragraph is just one sentence, bolded and on a separate line—
"This isn't a cell phone; it's another computer in my pocket."
Ling Yun leaned back in his chair and pushed the computer back to Chen Zhongming. Sunlight streamed in from the window, casting long shadows on the keyboard.
Who wrote this post?
"A student from a university in Beijing. Our customer service contacted him to send him some merchandise, but he said no, he just felt compelled to say something."
"How many times has it been shared?"
"Across all the major forums, the total number of views has exceeded one million. The longest post has over two thousand replies."
Ling Yun stood up. He took two steps in front of his desk, then picked up the internal phone and dialed the marketing department's number.
"Hey, Manager Chen? Have the marketing department's official Weibo account repost that article, 'My StarPhone's First Week.' No need to add comments, just repost it and say 'Thank you.'"
After hanging up the phone, he told Chen Zhongming, "Notify all team leaders to hold an emergency meeting in the conference room in half an hour."
There were about a dozen people in the conference room. Wang Jianguo came in carrying a coffee cup, the rim of which was stained with a brownish ring, indicating he had been up all night again. Li Mo was holding a test version of a power management chip, with flying wires still attached to its pins. Zhao Weiguo called from Guangzhou via video; the video froze slightly, but the sound was clear.
Lingyun stood in front of the whiteboard and wrote down the three main categories of user feedback: battery life, crashes, and number of apps.
"Let's go one by one. Jian Guo will start."
Wang Jianguo put down his coffee cup. "We've located the crash issue. It's caused by the app store's incremental update interface triggering a dangling pointer when memory is insufficient. The probability is very low, about one in a thousand. It's not difficult to fix; a patch will be released within three days and pushed out via OTA next week."
"Okay." Ling Yun checked the box next to "crash". "Battery life. Li Mo."
Li Mo held up the test chip. "The power management strategy has been optimized. We've reduced the wake-up frequency of background refreshes from once every fifteen minutes to once every thirty minutes, added a deep sleep mode to the GPS module, and automatically halved the touch sampling rate under static pages. Overall, the battery life can be improved by about 20%. But the prerequisite is that the system side has to cooperate—Jianguo, you need to add a power strategy configuration file in the next update."
Wang Jianguo typed a few lines on his laptop: "No problem, I'll have the kernel team start the adaptation tonight."
Lingyun also checked a box next to "Battery Life" and "Number of Apps".
"This can't be rushed," Chen Zhongming replied. "The developer incentive fund increased its amount last week, and newly launched high-quality apps will receive additional traffic support. But it will take at least one or two months for a high-quality app to go from development to launch."
"Then let's focus on perfecting the existing apps first." Ling Yun wrote two words on the whiteboard: "High-Quality." "We don't need to cram in all sorts of random apps like other app stores. Our review team personally reviews every app we put on the platform. Only apps that users say are good are truly good."
After the meeting, Wang Jianguo caught up with Ling Yun and they walked down the corridor.
"Mr. Ling, a user's reply in the crash feedback thread on the forum has gone viral. He said—" Wang Jianguo looked down at his phone, "After using StarPhone for a week, picking up his wife's Nokia again felt like going back from a car to a horse-drawn carriage. Now, just seeing a Nokia makes my hands itch; I want to swipe across its screen."
Ling Yun stopped in the corridor. "Don't laugh. Nokia will be making touchscreen phones soon too. We can't be complacent; we need to move even faster."
Wang Jianguo closed his phone and said, "Okay."
Ling Yun pushed open the office door. The unfinished expense report was still lying on the desk. He sat down, picked up a pen, signed two copies, then stopped. Dusk was already creeping in outside the window, and a row of streetlights illuminated the park. He picked up the internal phone and dialed Li Mo's number.
"When is the latest you can start mass production of your power management chip?"
Before the Spring Festival.
"Before the Spring Festival is too late, before Christmas."
There was a two-second silence on the other end of the phone. "Okay. I'll divide the team into two shifts, working 24/7."
Ling Yun hung up the phone. He tapped his fingers twice on the table, then continued signing expense reports. The sound of the pen nib gliding across the paper was very soft, like sand slowly flowing across glass.