The thin font is super unreadable on my Galaxy S4.
Same here, one plus one.
Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
51–60 of 85 posts
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
This the difference of listening to what your customers literally say and being able to deduce what it is what they need. "I want faster (or better) horses". Needs a follow up question or ability to understand the deeper core meaning. From the above quote. These are some off top of head self distilled thoughts on what that means I want to get from point a to b faster. (faster vehicle or teleportation.) I want less ti…
Amazing! That is the true essence of customer development. When you walk into a hardware store and ask for a 2-inch drill bit, it's not the tool you really want. What you really want is a 2-inch hole in the wall.
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Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#53Hi - UX designer here. So shoot me.
Firstly, you might consider that close to all basic ideas behind objectively successful products (eg the telephone, Facebook, photo copiers, Twitter, rabbit vibrators) were NOT arrived at by asking the target audience what they wanted. Most were intuition born of observing that audience.
When you ask people direct questions about what they want, it takes a great deal skill and judgement to actually get a successful product idea from that. In fact it's almost not worth the bother, and few professional designers really do it very often by choice. Far better to try to observe what people do (often by giving them tasks to complete in some sphere of activity) and see what comes out of that. You might see your target audience performing needless operations, misunderstanding things, or doing things that appear irrational to you but rational to them. Once you see that sort of thing happening, it's far easier then to see what they might need or really want.
I wouldn't go so far to say that asking people what they want is a bad idea, but it's getting close. Perhaps it's a mildly toxic idea best avoided in preference to observation.
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#54There can be counterexamples to that advice. Maybe since Tailwind is in the B2B space, this affects their bias of the recommendation. 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…
Yep, and in addition to not knowing what they want (at least sometimes), customers also don't generally have a detailed understanding of the costs associated with building new features. It's easy to say "I want X" if you're not the one who has to build it, integrate it into an existing platform, support it, etc.
Also, "customers" are not a monolithic group. Some will try to pull you in one direction, and others will want you to go the opposite way. You'll go crazy trying to please all of them. Just saying "listen to your customers; they'll tell you what to build" is a massive oversimplification.
At the end of the day, customer feedback can be very valuable, but only as a starting point. You have to internally decide which of the things, if any, you actually want to build.
But if you wrote a blog post that said: "listen to your customers and consider building what they ask for", it would sound obvious (because it is) and wouldn't drive any clicks.
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#55Hi - UX designer here. So shoot me. Firstly, you might consider that close to all basic ideas behind objectively successful products (eg the telephone, Facebook, photo copiers, Twitter, rabbit vibrators) were NOT arrived at by asking the target audience what they wanted. Most were intuition born of observing that audience. When you ask people direct questions about what they want, it takes a great deal skill and judg…
I should add that the key to this, also mentioned also in the article, is frequency. Observe often. Over time, you can then build hypotheses (which you can then also test out if you want). To use a crass example, Steve Jobs was anecdotally very driven by hypothesis. This (perhaps accidentally) let him to stick to his guns in design decisions because he was able to say things like, "I believe people want visually desirable computers in their homes, not overtly functional ones".
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#56There can be counterexamples to that advice. Maybe since Tailwind is in the B2B space, this affects their bias of the recommendation. 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…
> There can be counterexamples to that advice.
Welton's law of startup advice: for each trite bit of advice, there is an equal and opposite bit of trite advice.
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#57Hi - UX designer here. So shoot me. Firstly, you might consider that close to all basic ideas behind objectively successful products (eg the telephone, Facebook, photo copiers, Twitter, rabbit vibrators) were NOT arrived at by asking the target audience what they wanted. Most were intuition born of observing that audience. When you ask people direct questions about what they want, it takes a great deal skill and judg…
Users are a source for problems, not solutions, that's the designer's job. However, the most common way that users articulate problems is in the form of solutions. It's then the designer's job to reverse engineer what the problem is from the proposed solution and design a solution that both fixes the problem and is contextually appropriate to the rest of the product.
So when you listen to users and they tell you "you should do X", just blindly doing X is a path to failure but similarly ignoring them is also a path to failure.
There's an art to properly eliciting insight from users and it's a mix of observation, interrogation and thought. In general, the best advice I've found is focus on the emotional and not the logical. When you ask when was the last time you had a problem with our product, you force the user to come up with ad-hoc logical arguments and paradigms that are most often wrong. If you ask when was the last time you were frustrated or annoyed with our product, you hone in much more reliably on real sticking points.
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#58Hi - UX designer here. So shoot me. Firstly, you might consider that close to all basic ideas behind objectively successful products (eg the telephone, Facebook, photo copiers, Twitter, rabbit vibrators) were NOT arrived at by asking the target audience what they wanted. Most were intuition born of observing that audience. When you ask people direct questions about what they want, it takes a great deal skill and judg…
Users are a source for problems, not solutions, that's the designer's job. However, the most common way that users articulate problems is in the form of solutions. It's then the designer's job to reverse engineer what the problem is from the proposed solution and design a solution that both fixes the problem and is contextually appropriate to the rest of the product. So when you listen to users and they tell you "you…
I am a product manager at one of those big tech companies.
This is exactly right and IMO one of the most important skills a PM should have.
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#59> Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
It's 1901. I want a horse and buggy that can go 55 mph.
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#60 You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them.
By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.