What is Good Software?
Matthias Kahlert’s views on – What should be called a Good Software.
Software Quality
If you want the people to pay for your application it should have a high quality standard. It should be adequate to commercial application.
-- Sponsored Ads --
You should especially invest your time into the user interface. There can be as many good features and functions that other application don’t provide, but if it has a bad user interface it won’t be bought… People like to see nice icons, 3D buttons and pictures, so don’t neglect it. But don’t use too heavy graphics, and don’t make it too colorful!
-- Sponsored Ads --
And your application has to be bug free! No crashes, no bugs, no errors, no misbehavior! The major software companies can make some mistakes and they will still sell their applications.
So before shipping your application it is very important to test it. Find some beta testers that try your application on their machines, try it yourself at all possible circumstances (like locked disks, wrong calling parameters, etc.).
Software Usefulness
No one is willing to pay a shareware fee of US$20 for an application that he uses once a year. And make your application as easy to use as possible. Nobody likes to click through 20 dialog windows each time he uses the program.
Software Uniqueness
If there are ten other programs that do exactly the same like your application and that are as good as yours, your shareware registrations will obviously be low. If this is your situation you should consider to kill your project and try to concentrate on more promising things.
Easy Registrations
Make it as easy as possible for the users to pay your shareware fee. You should use a payment service provider like Kagi or Quicomm that handle the registrations for you. By using such a service the users can may with many different methods: cash, check, credit card, virtual cash, etc. And the most important thing: You don’t have to deal with all that registrations, they handle all for you (think about bad checks, or what would you do with credit card payments…).
And you should offer site licenses where appropriate. For some utilities site licenses can be very profitable.
Excellent Support
Always provide a very excellent support. Give the user the possibility the choose from different ways how to contact you: e-mail, fax, phone, etc. Concentrate especially on the e-mail support. Goodwill and badwill can flow very quickly across the Internet or other online systems (CompuServe, AOL). You can get very good publicity through the Internet…
