Ask HN: Do you find it challenging to talk to your users?

First surprising thing I learned is that users don't usually actually have the will to spend any amount of time giving feedback. But they will avoid admitting it. The second discouraging thing is that when you do get them to sit down and talk, you will find that they're really good at subverting and evading any sort of plan you might have had. And then finally, after you have managed to collect information, it can be extremely difficult to interpret the results and come back with clear insightful ideas for changes and improvements in the product.

To me, interviewing and talking to users is something between the role of an anthropologist and journalist. You sort of have to charm them enough for them to open up, but you also have to maintain scepticism about what they tell you. You have to be inquisitive. And on top of that you have to be able to set aside your own interpretations and thoughts so as not to tip the scales. It can be emotionally draining, especially when you have your own convictions.

I work with engineers and they hate talking to users. The process can be very vague and often feels fruitless to them. Engineers can be stubborn and hold on to their worldview because they strongly believe theirs is objective and there should only be right and wrong answers.

I don't know what it's like at a smaller or larger scale. I can imagine some things are easier, and some are harder. A large company may have real resources to spend on finding the answers which can bring more people to the table. A single-person operation might not have those resources but could be sympathetic enough to bring individuals to the table based on sympathy.

However, when you make discoveries and insights, those are things that can make or break your entire product. It's almost like panning for gold or fishing, you spend a lot of time searching and in doubt, and then you come across that one idea that really makes it all work. Anyways those are my thoughts. It's incredibly satisfying and I love it but I hate it.

And I am doing that in a variety of school systems to get feedback.

I do find getting 30-60 minutes with a user or group of users extremely valuable. You've really got to try and dig into their use case and understand them. And tell them to stop telling you what they think other people might do and get them to focus on themselves. Everyone likes to tell me what other users might want, and then asking them, well, do you do this? "Nope, but other people might..."

But once you get through that, the rewards are fantastic. You can build some frameworks around your users and have a much better intuition of who would like what and how they would use it. Then reach back out and ask.

One other method I use is an ask for features button on the app. Once they ask for a feature, I ask if they are open to connecting over zoom so I can deeply understand their use case. And sometimes they get their feature built, and sometimes they get something much better.

When I read the OP question I took "difficult to talk with users" as being about the content of discussion/feedback not the mechanisms for soliciting it, so I'll stick with that take....

I'd say, you need to know what you want.

You will definitely get extremes. I deal with feedback as a teacher, developer, author or musician, and many of the same things apply. Some will be straight, some over-nice, some funny and teasing, some will be rude and angry. But what you want is useful responses, regardless of emotional sentiment and how it's packaged.

How do you filter for that? Like the guidelines of HN it's good to take the most sincere interpretation possible and look for attempts to communicate nuggets of useful critique. Someone who knocks your work down can be great, not even because they're right, but because they do so in a useful way, maybe by making you think about something.

It's good to have a framework for identifying and interpreting things you're looking for. When I post on HN, because I am researching for a book, I have a kinda X-Keyscore selector set in mind - I'm looking for ethical/moral signals, nuggets that reveal underlying attitudes of hackers. But that could apply to any product or project and a set of information you're interested in seeking.

A research method that can help you with this is thematic analysis and sentiment analysis. You "code" responses and score them as to how much they tell you about pre-selected areas you;re trying to improve... installation, usability, cost, configuration, interoperability.... and so on. Then, if you're going to respond, get back to those users on those specific points for clarification.

The best way to find out what a customer wants is to ask them.

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