

What Do People Want? - pogos
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/d9ae653ee444cee5

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mixmax
This is very insightful.

The startup I'm working on now is in the project management space, which I
think is an unsolved and hard problem. And it's definitely something people
want. When I started working on it I thought that it would be pretty easy, but
I found that when I asked 10 project managers they all wanted subtly different
software.

Everybody wanted good project management software, but unfortunately everyone
I talked to also had differing opinions on what this would include. The
hardest part was getting the details right, not from a coding perspective
which is pretty simple, but from an interface and usability perspective.
Nobody sees the code anyway.

Solving a problem in detail, and doing it in a way that people want is really
really hard. Often much harder than coding it.

~~~
vyrotek
And even when you think you have all the details right, people change their
minds the next day!

~~~
mixmax
yes, the problem is like the famous quote of judge Potter Stewart when asked
how to define obscenity: _"I don't know, but I damn well know it when I see
it"_

Users don't know what they want, that is the problem you have to solve.
They'll be able to recognise software that solves their problem when they see
it, but they have no idea of what it should look like or what it should do
when you ask them.

The hard part is taking all the itches you hear about from users, reading
between the lines, inferring, asking additional questions, making mock-ups,
etc. and creating a good cure for the itches.

I think that successful execution of this is the primary factor in successful
software.

~~~
trapper
I have found that out of approximately 500 users (talking face to face) you
get 1-2 who actually DO know what they need, how it should look and act. We
hired one and listened intently to the other.

It's a long search, but really, really worth it. I agree though - the coding
is the simple part.

------
YuriNiyazov
I tend to feel cheated out of my time when I come to the end of a post like
this one, because it seems to focus on the wrong thing. Here's what my issue
is:

"What do people want?" is a very broad and imprecise question, and on that
level, it is very easy to answer. I've been alive for a little more than a
quarter of a century, and I can easily tell you what I want.

1) I want it to be easier to maintain and improve my health. 2) I want my
relationships - friendships, business partnerships, romances - to require less
effort to maintain and grow. 3) I want it to be easier to acquire and retain
new knowledge and learn new skills.

I am willing to bet that at their core, everyone has an approximation of at
least those desires, and then some. However, the things that I've outlined are
just the difficulties of "the human condition", if you will. Breaking down
those problems into their more detailed subproblems is difficult, but it seems
that solving those is infinitely more difficult, and pushes them off into the
realm of science fiction. These are important, hard problems where a working
technical solution would make the inventors orders of magnitude more money
than solving some pain point that some company in some niche market has.

~~~
shiro
Yeah, I also felt that the poster was just bragging on and on like a boring
talk at a bar counter... oh wait, it's _my_ post!

Now I remember. It was within a long discussion with a guy who kept
complaining nobody had respected his accomplishment and wanted to hire him. I
wanted to tell him that he had to have feedback loop to align his and others'
interest. (And to be honest, I was already irritated to the guy at this
point.) That was the context.

I don't deny that there are important problems worth to tackle even nobody
seems to care about them. But if you do so, you won't complain about nobody
caring, will you?

------
alain94040
I strongly support the part about opening up and not keeping your ideas to
yourself.

I'll eventually write a post on this, but if you remember Mark Cuban's "open
source funding" from a few days ago, there are similarities. I have a good
idea for a product and I posted it on Mark's blog. And the idea got written
about in 70 newspapers and magazines within 48 hours.

Is anyone copying my idea because it's public? I don't think so.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
What's the idea?

~~~
alain94040
<http://www.slideshare.net/alain94040/xtremetalk> (sorry for the late
response).

------
msort
Here is an idea: make a whatdoyouwant.com

Every business/government/person should have such a mechanism(e.g.
WebSite,Voting, Congress...) to understand what people want.

~~~
pogos
<http://www.whynot.net/>

------
Spyckie
They don't want the perfect Pepsi, they want the perfect Pepsence.

[http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spagh...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html)

Seriously, the big name brand companies have done a ton of research on this
already - we should learn from them for once.

~~~
jeroen
Gladwell says "Pepsi's", as in more than 1 Pepsi.

------
skmurphy
"You can't expect people to tell what they want straightforwardly if you ask
them, since people often don't know what they want at the surface of their
consciousness, or cannot articulate it."

People do tell you what they want, it's just that normally companies have
already formed to supply those needs.

------
satyajit
On the similar note: I consider Apple at the top of innovation pyramid because
they create something with (almost) no predecessors, yet they make something
that 'everyone' wants! To me, that's true innovation!

