I Repeat: Do Not Listen to Your Users
Paul Buchheit on listening to users: I wrote the first version of Gmail in one day. It was not very impressive. All I did was stuff my own email into the Google Groups (Usenet) indexing engine. I sent it out to a few people for feedback, and they said that
blog.codinghorror.com
Do not listen to what they say they want.
Listen to the problems they have, and solve them.
That’s brilliant, going to have to remember that!
Wow. That's a great way of putting it.
A tweet thread by Jared Spool:
And this presentation by Tomer Sharon, former Google researcher and the creator of the atomic research approach:
https://youtu.be/gq7ZfeQSBzY
Both explore the same distinction
well said, there is a big difference to what they say and what they do ..
This is the idea that users don't know what they want. But that isn't exactly true. If they didn't know what they wanted they wouldn't be using your product in the first place. Users do know what they want, but they don't know how they want it. That's why they give feedback.
There's a difference between feedback and preferences. Most often users give feedback by stating what they like or what they think they would like in a product, so, as a product designer/maker, you have to listen to both, then be able to discern the difference.
Eg: If the user says he doesn't like a feature, that's a preference. If he says the feature is hindering his experience, that's feedback.
So, I think you should listen to (and observe) your users, but don't implement everything they say. They trust you to make the best decision.
Insightful, thanks for sharing!
Great podcast episode on getting feedback from users: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0wQa0tC7M0kj7KiK7rEoXq
This company changed products 5 times, every time addressing a more significant user pain point!
I'm reading "The Mom Test" right now and it's awesome, highly recommended. All about how to talk to your customers.
The author recommends not talking about your product at all. It's not your customers job to tell you if your product is a good idea. It's your job to figure that out.
TLDR - I think its important to listen to your users but not necessarily build every feature they want
I've learned that users don't know what is going on behind the scenes, in other words, they don't have full access to all the info they need to be able to give good feedback. Of course, some feedback can be helpful regardless of what they know, but really it comes down to what you as the business owner thinks works best with all of the data you have, as long as you are not being biased, that can be a problem, haha.
Yep, it's a delicate balancing act between taking customer feedback and rejecting it. People love saying "the customer is always right" but that assumption is dead wrong. "The customer always feels right" is the reality, and it's your job as a business owner to parse trash criticism from the constructive feedback, because the customer sometimes IS right.
I 100% identify with this. When I was gathering early user feedback it was surprising how many people said they would pay a certain price for my product, for example, but then when the product fully launched they didn't buy. This is a clear case of users/buyers not knowing what they'll want in the future. It's really hard to get around this but i've found by asking the right questions and then just knowing what to listen to and what to ignore, but that comes from experience.
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