
You’re asking the wrong question - MicahWedemeyer
http://blog.aisleten.com/2008/11/20/youre-asking-the-wrong-question/#comments
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unalone
Incidentally, this in reverse is an excellent way to gauge character and
experience. When people ask you what you think, if you're bluntly critical of
their idea, the ones who accept your criticism and figure out ways to fix
their idea (if it was broken) are the ones who are capable enough to see the
value in good ideas. The ones who get mad at your criticism are going nowhere
fast.

Holds true across nearly every category. Anybody who makes things and gets
offended when people don't like it won't find it easy to progress.

~~~
DaniFong
It really depends on the criticism. Some people do not _critique_ things so
much as dismiss them. It is a waste of time to engage with such people is such
a mode.

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markessien
He's making a wrong statement. If you ask 10 people who think they know
software what their opinion is - you will get 10 opinions, and there is no way
to know which one will work.

Stay true to your vision, the first change you should make is when you try to
use it, and it does not work well, or when the first people try to use it, and
you are finding out that they are not doing what they should be doing.

~~~
demallien
Exactly. Most people can't tell if software is going to be usefule to them
until you put it into their hands and get them to try it out - even
experienced programmers have problems with this.

As an example, I recently wrote an application. The application was designed
to meet a need that I had that no software package seems to currenty meet -
specifically allowing me to create a program to follow on my exercise bike at
home whose idea of an onboard computer is a counter that gives a fake number
of metres ridden since the start of the session. As a secondary goal, I wanted
to use this app to learn Cocoa for the Mac, which would lead me into iPhone
development. As a tertiary goal, I thought it would be nice to put the app on
sale - after all, I can hardly be unique right? If I see the need for this
app, surely others could too!

So, after three months of work, I had a pretty nice app. No known bugs, easy
to use, reasonably pretty, but of course, hey, it doesn't do a lot except
roughly copy the functionality of any half-decent exercise bike's on-board
computer, so nothing special. _I_ knew that the app was useful - I had been
using it daily for about 2 months at this point, and it was actually really
good at getting me to work up a sweat. But then I tried to explain to family
and friends what this app did. Every single one of them wanted to know how you
plugged the computer into the bike, which of course you can't do, because the
bike has a brain dead onboard computer with no way of connecting _anything_ ,
hence the need to write this piece of software (for the curious, the program
simply keeps a running counter based on a timer and your program - if you've
programmed a higher speed for a block of the program, the counter increments
faster. The user has to keep the bike's counter up with the computer's
counter).

The problem was that everyone has the model of the exercise bike computer that
changes the gears of the bike the higher the bar is on the little readout. My
system can't change the gears, not being connected to the bike, instead it
just makes you pedal faster (which achieves the same goal of making you work
harder). But because the app goes against what people expect, it was next to
impossible to get them enthused about it without sitting them down on a bike,
with the app running next to them, and making them do a program. _Then_ they
understood what the point was, but to this day I have never succeeded in
getting someone to understand the app's main usage just by explaining it. I
eventually decided to not put the thing on the market, because I couldn't see
any easy solution to the marketing difficulties, and anyhow, I had already
achieved goals #1 and #2 with the project.

All of that to say that asking for people's opinions on an _idea_ is very
unlikely to work very well, unless you have really good communication skills,
and even then, the person listening needs to have a certain capacity to
envision something that doesn't exist, and not everyone can do that.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
I would counter that if you asked the question "Why does this idea suck" up
front, you'd have gotten that exact feedback way earlier in the process.

Why does it suck? Because it doesn't interface with the bike. As you put it
yourself, "it goes against what people expect" It's not that you should quit,
but that you need to think about this ahead of time and figure out
specifically how you're going to counter these expectations.

~~~
demallien
Well, _I_ would counter that you just made my point for me! The reason the app
sucks is not that it doesn't connect to the bike - if you get someone to use
it whilst actually on a bike they see the utility straight away (and indeed
the base problem the app solves is how to get a decent exercise program going
when your on-board computer is braindead, and hence can't be connected to).
The problem is that it is very difficult to market. If I had asked the
question 'Why does this suck?', people would have told me that it's because it
doesn't connect to the bike, when in fact the real problem is elsewhere -
asking the question would have got me the wrong answer, which was the point I
was trying to make in my first point.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
Good point...

But I would counter your counter by saying that you identified _late in the
game_ that you were going to have a very hard time marketing the app due to
people's expectations. Poor marketing and inability to get users to bite kills
plenty of decent ideas. Not recognizing that early on is as damning as
building something that collapses when you try to scale it.

I'm not saying your idea is a bad one. I'm just saying that getting criticism
early on, even of a vague idea, can be very helpful. It can help you not only
in implementing your idea, but also in implementing any marketing strategies
or deciding how you want to position your product.

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thwarted
Is this supposed to go to the first comment?

