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

blog.tailwindapp.com

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

#61

Post by eveningcoffee »

ProxCoques wrote: post #53

Hi - 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 think that the key questions are not what you want or what you want to have but rather what you want to do or even more importantly what you want to accomplish.

Of course in addition UX designers do have their own demons to fight. I would call one of them as cosmic expansion of the space, that is - contrast will decrease and distance between meaningful UI elements will increase over the time.

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

#63

Post by crimsonalucard »

IMO, this is trivial advice. It is obvious to sell people things they tell you to sell to them.

True business acumen comes from understanding two things that are not as obvious:

1. A customer often does Not Know what he wants.

2. What a man wants is malleable and can be shaped and influenced by forces created by other men.

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

#64

Post by sriku »

shalmanese wrote: post #57
ProxCoques wrote: post #53

Hi - 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…

One of my teachers used to express this succinctly the following way -

Imagine a patient going to a doctor and asking a course of antibiotics. Any doctor would erase that request and start asking the patient to describe their problem. This, he said, is the core of how a user feedback conversation should go.

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

#65

Post by Nition »

sambe wrote: post #13

The signal to noise ratio tends to be poor though. So many will insist and swear and beg and threaten about what they think they need, or what they used to do, or what they won't pay for but would like to have if it's free and maintained indefinitely. There's often a background noise of "all change is bad" and some improvements are not as clear as helicopter vs rush hour traffic, so the benefit will take time to appr…

This is true. And the bigger a company is the more there is to trawl through.

Still, you get stuff like this 14 page thread dating back two years asking Dropbox to stop forcing new folders to automatically sync[1], or this 10 page thread spanning 3½ years where adding an external email to hotmail/outlook.com was broken[2]. Never any official response, just moderators posting form responses like robots. Those are where I feel things have gotten a bit ridiculous, when the company stops ever interacting with the customers at all.

[1] https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox/Stop-auto-inheriting...

[2] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail...

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

#66

Post by katzgrau »

ProxCoques wrote: post #53

Hi - 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 built my business by listening to customers. Do I discount a bunch of ideas that come my way? Absolutely.

But over over time you begin to develop a filter that separates really good ideas and mediocre ideas that serve a single or rare use case.

Observing is great if you have the bandwidth, but if you're a one-person-show, listen to your customers, listen to your instinct, and develop features that are going to drive revenue and push you forward.

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

#67

Post by SN76477 »

ProxCoques wrote: post #53

Hi - 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…

As a UX designer do you use heatmaps as a tool to determine if your audience is taking the actions that you expect them to take?

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

#68

Post by SN76477 »

I was watching Seinfeld recently. It was a 90s skit of him talking about the answering machine. How sometimes you would be disappointed if someone answered the phone.

I was thinking, wow, he is just talking sending sms messages. The crowd would laugh or woot in what seemed to be agreement.

He didn't know what he wanted, but there was a problem that he and everyone wanted a solution for. At the time in the 90s, it was a social problem (not wanting to waste time with an annoying person on the phone) but in the 2000's that problem was solved with technology.

A lot of times, customers do not know what they want. Imagine what Jerry's answer would have been if we had asked him a question about pinging his contacts list to know if they were available in 1991. He wouldn't have understood and honestly, no one would want to carry around a massive rolodex at the time, so the answer would have been silly at best.

I did find the video .. someone else noticed the same thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UeINnBMFA4

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

#69

Post by pedalpete »

atopiler wrote: post #32
fredgrott wrote: post #20

If Apple did that than they would been out of business 25 years ago.. Steve Jobs did not ask Apple customers what to build but predicted what in the future apple should build to get more customers. This is not to say that customer feedback is not important but to clarify that it pertains to very short-term marketing in that it only refers to somewhat minor-point increments in fine-tuning the current product.

I have to whole-heartedly disagree with this. Customer development and feedback don't just apply to short-term marketing and minor-point improvements. That couldn't be further from the truth. The "They'll tell you what to build" isn't meant to be taken literally. If you listen and try to truly understand people's problems, they'll guide you towards the most useful solutions. Coming up with those solutions is still up…

Actually, I'd suggest people did tell them to build the iPhone, and the iPod.

They looked at the problems with the MP3 market at the time, tiny devices with poor user-interfaces and their solution to the state of the market at the time was the iPod. Unexpected from Apple which was only a computer company at the time.

Once we had our iPods we were carrying around an iPod and a phone (Blackberry was huge at the time). They understood customers wanted a single device, it had to have great messaging like a blackberry, and do all the music and video needs of an iPod of that era. Blackberry had apps, a web-browser, maps, etc. It's important not to forget that. Apple did a better job with the browser and gave the thing a full-size touch screen. Customers didn't ask for that, but they had asked for the basic device. Apple took what was asked for and put their own scrutiny to it to see just how amazing they could make it.

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

#70

Post by pedalpete »

I've been doing lots of customer interviews lately, and I'm absolutely loving it. I think this bit of advice from the article is dead wrong "know exactly who you want to talk to and what you want to know".

I've got a product that is growing nicely and that users love, but we haven't been able to monetize it yet. Lots of other comments point to things like Ford's (misattributed) "they'd say I want a faster horse".

Don't ask people directly what they want, find out what they are doing, what they need to do, and you'll start to find a pattern emerge.

The reason I feel you can't know what you want to find out or discuss is that you can miss exactly what the customer is telling you.

In my experience, I will often ask pointed questions about what more we can do, and I get blank stares and uses just say "it's great" and give me requests for minor improvements. When I probe them about other parts of their business, they open up about what they are doing in other segments which to them are completely different than what we do, but when I point out the similarity, and what we could do in these other areas to help them out, they perk right up and come up with a bunch of good ideas that they are happy to pay for.

So be flexible, and look for patterns more than answers. I'd also suggest, if you're in the same place as I am looking to monetize an existing product that most see as free, ask where they are spending money and see if there is opportunity for those funds to be re-allocated to you.

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