A couple of days ago I was looking through the analytics for one of my web apps (I’m currently testing out Heap Analytics and am pleased so far) and saw some traffic was coming from a particular website. I clicked through to it and found a roundup of products in my space (film production software) with a two or three paragraph review of each. And my product was included!
The only problem was that the article was in Spanish. Even after two years of Spanish in high school and two and a half years of Spanish in college (not to mention living in Los Angeles for 15 years) I cannot read or speak it. I can speak just enough to get by in a foreign country with active use of hand gestures. (Thankfully most people are too polite to roll their eyes as I’m throwing around more gestures than a third-base coach.)
I used Google Translate on it and learned that my site has an attractive design! It also praised the number of options and said that the majority of it was simple to use. So far so good.
Unfortunately the review went downhill from there. It said, “almost nothing works as it should.” It followed that with an example but the translation lost the context. More tutorials was also mentioned as something needed. In the end I did not get a recommendation. The blow was softened as the reviewer said, “give it time to grow.”
I’m definitely going to need to solicit more feedback and get some more example workflows (it seems like everybody producing movies has their own workflow). And I’m going to keep improving on what I have until my software is something that people want to recommend to their friends and peers.
Even though it wasn’t favorable I’m honored to have been included in that review and am going to take it as an opportunity to do better. If my software isn’t helping my users then I need to know about it. I’ve still got a lot of work ahead of me.
(As an aside I’m not sure why Google Alerts didn’t pick this up. Maybe due to it being in another language?)