It comes through in a variety of channels - your mom, your first user, the users who never come back.
You can't control where feedback comes from. The only thing you can control is what you do with feedback.
Here's what most people do: They collect feedback, read it, and say thank you. If they keep hearing the same feedback, they put it into a spreadsheet. Maybe they synthesize the feedback in a 'power hour' and write up a few user stories. The team rallies behind these stories, and they make changes to improve the product.
But a user story lacks the authenticity of the actual feedback. A user story is a manifestation of feedback.
It's not scalable to talk to users face-to-face. In 30 minutes, users drop product-shaping quotes or highlight inconsistencies sparingly. Product people rarely have the ability to consistently talk to users. Developers definitely don't.
So what do you do? You collect feedback and funnel it into spreadsheets.
There is one alternative. Get users to record videos, and force them to be short. A short video does two things:
1. Short videos force users to make their feedback concise. 2. Short videos are easy to share, watch, and digest.
dscout is building a product that gives you short user feedback videos––videos that are similar to a user talking face-to-face, and that are short enough that you can watch, analyze, and send the feedback among your team.
The product is called Sprint, designed to be fast enough for a team that doesn't have time to collect, organize, process, and disperse feedback. In fact, Sprint does virtually all of that for you.