"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" -- Knuth
Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
71–80 of 85 posts
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#72Imagine the frankenlaptop the Mac would be if Apple ever listened to its customers? CD-ROM , touch screen, fm radio, infrared whatevs
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#73Hi - 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?
No, because heatmaps only tell you what is happening, not why.
And even then they can be telling you nothing at all because you don't know things like user intent. Harry Brignull's summary of the issues on this is required reading here (about eye tracking but applies to all such heat mapping tools):
http://www.slideshare.net/harrybr/what-you-need-to-know-abou...
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#74There 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…
The Atari Lynx wasn't massive because it needed to be; the creators listened to their customers: "In all the focus group testing, and we did a lot of it with consumers, we had a bunch of different models that we showed them," Mical recalled in an interview with 1UP.com. "[We asked] "which one do you like? Which one would you like to have it be?" We showed them big ones; we showed them little ones. We showed them giga…
Focus groups are absolutely the worst way of getting product insights. Unless they are extremely well run to counterbalance a huge number of cognitive biases and random influences within the group, don't do them. They can be worse than useless.
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#75Hi - 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…
Agreed, When conducting user feedback we always try to identify what the users frustrations are and then our team will work on coming up with solutions based off our findings.
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#76I agree that doing more listening than speaking when talking to customers is important. It's also important to remember that customers will tell you they want features they they won't actually use or pay for. So it's necessary to develop an understanding of what your customers do and what problems they're trying to solve. This often helps more than just listening to features they say they want. If your customers aren…
I agree with most of your points. I would add that when you put a person in a position that you have asked them for input, they will feel pressured to give SOME kind of input, whether or not it is actually warranted. You're kind of setting them up to give input in the same way you might set someone up to tell a joke, they feel pressured to fill that space with SOMETHING. Most of the time when I have built features th…
"When people tell you something is wrong, they are most often right. When they tell you how to fix it, they are always wrong"
~ Neil Gaiman
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#77I read an amazing book on customer development: The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick - https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/... The first few pages blew my mind. It was a great read all the way through.
Having read several customer development books, I second that recommendation.
One of the main takeaways of the book is that you should always start by asking factual questions. What do you do. What software do you use to do that. When's the last time you did that. How did you feel about it. Etc.
No "What ifs", no "would yous." Don't ask how much they would pay if [you could code whatever feature by next week].
That may seem obvious, but most people go for the second type of question right away.
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#78One thing is listening and acting based on what you understood, which you should definitely be doing. This requires product planning and thinking, as any you've ever done.
Just blindly doing what your customers tell you is not what you should be doing, it's just design by committee on a massive scale.
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#79This is both true and dangerous advice. You must listen to your customers, but then you must conceptualize their needs, prioritize them, and think about how to solve those needs well . There is nothing worse than a "Christmas tree product" where every customer has hung some requirement and there is no conceptual unity or design. Loads of "enterprise" products are hairballs like this. TL;DR: It's not listen -> impleme…
Most people will read this title as, "Build what your customers tell you to build." The key here is that most customers will be happy to tell you they want all kinds of features and the best/only solution or feature looks like X. You have to go deeper. You have to listen to understand what they actually need. I hate being that guy that trots out a quote from a historic figure, but c'mon, this is a slam dunk: "If I ha…
> I hate being that guy that trots out a quote from a historic figure...
Don't worry, it was a made up quote. You're safe.
Re: Listen to Your Customers, They’ll Tell You What to Build
#80The 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 wher…
Oh my god I can't stand moderator responses. Worse when they're just copy+paste and they didn't even read your request/question. Been happening on Github more and more too with issues.