Death by a Thousand Bugs

“What’s the ROI of not making your users lives miserable?”

Bug fixes and usability improvements aren’t sexy. They won’t win you accolades. You probably won’t brag to your friends about them unless they improve some metric by 10,000%. That’s probably why less experienced product people hate working on them.

You know who hates them more? Your users. They encounter them regularly and it degrades the experience of using your service.

What’s worse is that they are usually small. By themselves they are teeny, tiny pain points that don’t happen all the time. But there can be hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of them depending on the complexity of a product. In aggregate they make using a product worse than you know.

Just think about your own product for a second. There’s might be a broken field on a settings form. A paragraph of text that’s hard to read. A button you have to click 5 times before it submits. A page without a loading state that looks like a broken page. A helpful tooltip that only appears once the entire site loads. Or a graphic that loads really slowly on mobile. These all add up.

One itch is annoying. Itching constantly and all over your body becomes miserable. Now If the itching only goes away when you stop visiting the beautiful pond with all the mosquitoes, you’ll probably think twice about going there. This is what happens when you don’t fix as many of the small issues you can because the “ROI” isn’t big enough.

This is worse than churn. It’s bleeding. As we speak some user is getting fed up with all the issues you’ve sidelined and is either using your product less, deleting your app, or cancelling their premium subscription. These bugs might be literally bleeding you dry of users and revenue.

So how do you stop the bleeding? You might need to rethink the experience, hide certain features, or even kill them entirely. The simpler and more immediate thing you can do is bundle all these small fixes together until the ROI does become big enough to justify tackling them immediately.

More importantly, you should make it a regular habit to figure out your bleed. Churn is when your users leave for various reasons, some beyond your control. Bleed is when users leave because of bugs and usability issues that you can fix.

Ask yourself, how many users are rage quitting because it’s less painful to leave than it is to stay? How many potential users are pitstopping after sign up because the onboarding tutorial keeps breaking? How many of these users are telling other potential users to stay away? Doesn’t sound so small when you put it in these terms.

Kim Scott in her book Radical Candor mentions an HBR article that talks about the major benefit of continually making small improvements:

One big idea is pretty easy to copy, but thousands of tweaks are impossible to see from the outside, let alone imitate.

Finally as a rule it’s more expensive to acquire a new user than it is to keep an existing one, and unlike new features, the benefits of usability and bug fixes compound. I once worked with an engineer who loved to brag about how much money he’d saved the company just from fixing all the small billing bugs. At the time the ROI would’ve been maybe thousands of dollars. Over all the years since he’s made those changes it’s probably now in the millions.

So how much is the ROI of making your users less miserable?

Bigger than you think.