Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build

If you're in the Enterprise/SaaS/B2B space, it seems more common to closely track what your (paying) customers want.

However, if you're in B2C or mass market, there are successful examples of being bold with providing something your customers didn't ask for. An example is the Facebook "newsfeed" feature rollout in 2006.[1] They initially had a user revolt over it but Mark Z and his team stuck to their guns and sure enough, the newsfeed became addictive and contributed to the envious engagement metrics that Myspace/Friendster couldn't match.

It's the modern variation of Ford's apocryphal "if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

But that doesn't mean all counter-intuitive decisions by businesses always make sense. Steve Jobs removing the floppy drive on iMac met disapprovals and eventually was vindicated by fast USB adoption ... but the jury is still out on removing the headphone jack from the iPhone 7.

Setting aside the missteps by Apple, a creative startup could identify with Steve Jobs saying, "customer's don't know what they want until we've shown them."

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2006/09/06/facebook-users-revolt-face...

Nobody is going to tell you how to do it. it has to come from you.

Customer Development is a process that's really meant to be applied to prospective customers. The whole point is to figure out what problems the market needs, and ultimately what kind of solutions there might actually be a market for.

Instead of building something and then going to people and asking if it's useful, find out what a large segment of the market would find useful first.

Get out of the building and talk to actual people - create simple experiments to help you prove whether a market actually exists. Validate your assumptions before building. Follow the Lean Startup methodology :)

Similarly, I've found that users often express all sorts of suggestions for how to accomplish some need they have. While many of their ideas are (from a UX/design standpoint) horrible, the core need is valid and often highlight something important that has been misunderstood or overlooked by the design.

The hardest people to get "needs" information from are intelligent, computer-literate people, who are often unwilling to admit that they find something counter-intuitive, and often frame their feedback in a way that conceals that fact... But who will end up not using something because of the friction that a suboptimal design causes.

I've also found it helpful to let people draw mocks of their solutions with a sharpie and to also share my own impromptu sharpie mocks with them based on their feedback.

At the very least, this process makes them feel respected and lower their guard which can often help them share information that is helpful in designing a product.

The craziest moments are when it turns out after weeks of trying to understand a user's feedback, that the user simply wanted a report view of some information and was trying to give feedback to make an interaction design turn into a report. This is quite common, especially in a feedback group where the highest status person is the manager who does actually need a report but is offering general feedback on general usability.