

Listening to users is bad. - iloveyouocean
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2008/11/19/listening-to-users-is-bad/

======
patio11
Well, he does run a dating site with millions of users and a staff of 1.5. He
couldn't listen to users even if he wanted to. Additionally, the majority of
his users are transients (online dating = if you are successful using the
product you should never be back) and any long-term user community he builds
up is almost pathological by definition (see earlier point).

Contrast this with your typical business: your best customers are the ones who
join early and stay _forever_. Customers have an interest in the site/software
continuing to evolve because they anticipate they will continue using it.
Long-term customers are excellent sources of feedback because expertise with
your problem domain is something to be sought after and carefully cultivated,
rather than a black mark.

~~~
iloveyouocean
_(online dating = if you are successful using the product you should never be
back) and any long-term user community he builds up is almost pathological by
definition_

Or so goes the conventional "Your success is your own un-doing." online dating
industry mantra. Most sites today are so terrible that a user is forced to run
a near endless gauntlet of trials and tribulations before they meet anyone
remotely suitable. This leads to a scarcity mentality which many people react
to by 'latching on' to the first acceptable person. As a corollary, many
people think that online daters are only in it to search for 'the right one.'

But in reality, most online daters would in fact like to meet "the reasonable
10" and have some options to choose from. That was our thinking behind
<http://flowmingle.com> . We wanted to lower the cost of finding a reasonable
person and setting up a date, and make going on a date a likely and regular
event.

In this way, yes, your customers eventually leave, but in the meantime they
have had a good experience and will come back if they need to. The supply of
single people is endless and lucrative for an effective site that treats their
customers well.

------
foulmouthboy
_Name me a single hugely successful internet company that is driven and built
by user suggestions._

Flickr? Craigslist?

 _To create something game changing you have to be like apple, you just build
interesting stuff and test it on users until you find something that works and
then you release it to everyone._

How will we know if it works if you don't listen to the users? Quantitative
information always benefits from qualitative feedback. It's really not enough
to know _what's_ successful if we can't tell how or why it's successful.

Also, the advice from almost anybody creating new and interesting products is
to place yourself in the shoes of the user and build things that you yourself
would find useful. Who should we be listening to then?

~~~
defunkt
I think he's saying "ignore what your users say, pay attention to what they
do." User testing is seeing what they do, listening to suggestions on a forum
is listening to what they say.

~~~
neilk
It's a mix. You can try out what they say if it seems like a good idea to you.
But the only test is whether it changes user behavior or drives signups or
whatever.

------
spolsky
anecdote! w00t! _victory_ _lap_

~~~
aneesh
Agreed. I have another bone to pick with this article as well.

"X is bad. You must do Y to succeed."

Absolute statements like this are almost always dangerous to make, and I don't
trust the articles that make them. Success or failure at anything is all about
making the right tradeoffs. Advice should focus on helping you weigh those
tradeoffs intelligently rather than dictating absolutes.

But dictating absolutes is so much easier, and I guess that's why everyone
does it.

~~~
mjnaus
>>Success or failure at anything is all about making the right tradeoffs.
Advice should focus on helping you weigh those tradeoffs intelligently rather
than dictating absolutes.

Very well said indeed!

------
markessien
He's right. Software design is art, software development is a craft. You can't
create art by consensus. You need creative people, and the creative people
need to be in-sync with each other.

Movies don't have 10 directors.

------
timcederman
Oh, and Google listen VERY closely to what their users say. I've been involved
in several user studies there, and qualitative feedback is huge to them.

------
mattmaroon
Why do people listen to this guy? He's got the English skills of a third-
grader (though he does seem to be improving). He built a really bad site (even
by online dating standards I'm told) and spammed it until the network effect
took over. Yet a lot of people take his words as the gospel just because he
gets a big AdSense check.

~~~
greyman
I personally don't take his words as the gospel, but I have no problem to
admit, that I will listen to him "just because he gets a big AdSense check".
Because "just getting big Adsense check" isn't that easy to do, especially
with a "bad site". ;-)

------
sunkencity
we'll he's onto something, but that doesn't mean you don't have to listen. The
most active users are often several hundred percent more active than the
average joe. In fact, there's no relevance of the "average" user because the
the user pattern doesn't follow a bell curve, it's a power law. Check out
[http://www.extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter%20Three-
Shi...](http://www.extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter%20Three-Shirky.pdf)
for some interesting math on many-to-many people networks.

------
blader
There are no absolutes in this. Listening to users blindly while ignoring your
quantitative metrics is bad. Ignoring user sentiment and relying solely on
quantitative metrics is also bad. The art is in how you use the two types of
data to inform your product decisions.

------
edw519
Mistitled.

Probably should have been, "To create something game changing, listening to
users is bad."

For the other 99%, ignore your users at your own peril.

------
paul9290
We user uservoice feedback tab and react to the top two to three suggestions
that get up voted.

Like 500 people suggested and agreed about X. Definitely want to listen to
that!

------
timcederman
An important skill as a designer is to learn how to filter user feedback. This
cannot be underestimated.

 _Then_ pay attention to how they react to it.

