
You launched early and your users' feedback is all useless or wrong. How to get useful feedback?  - timg

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far33d
How could all your user feedback be wrong?

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SwellJoe
They all came from TechCrunch, perhaps?

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webwright
So you just create a contact form and expect feedback to come in without any
effort?

Buy lunch for 5 local users and brainstorm. Get your friends to try the app,
have a dinner party and brainstorm. Go to survey monkey and add a short survey
to your app.

You need to seek out feedback from a broad spectrum of your users and ask
specific questions (hopefully based on the voluntary feedback that you've
received to date).

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tocomment
Here's how I try to think of it. There are going to be some features that you
realize are crucial to add. They'll be so obvious you won't even need to write
them down. The point of getting user feedback is not to get requests for
random little things, but rather to find out how they are using the site, and
discover with them those crucial features that are obviously needed.

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JMiao
It's very possible you're missing the point, unless the users are spamming you
guys, which, in that case, would be your fault for not wisely selecting a
private beta.

What do you mean by bad feedback? In most cases, "bad feedback" occurs when
startups disagree with their users. "You'll see," they say. Well, you know how
that story ends.

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zaidf
Evaluate what you yourself define as useless and useful feedback.

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timg
I define useless feedback as people telling me that they want some obscure
feature which I then implement and then, predictably, no one, not even the
requester ever uses at all.

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cyu
You shouldn't blindly implement features just because your users are telling
you to do so. While it is important to listen and react to your user's
concerns, it's also your responsibility to maintain the integrity/consistency
of the application. Also, if you don't believe that the feature you're
building is going to have any effect, then it's already heading towards
failure because you're not going to be committed to its success.

I agree with jkush -- if you don't agree with the user, you should engage the
user and see if you can get the feature to a common ground that you can agree
with.

Also, if your feedback loop is just an email, maybe you should add a forum to
make the loop more interactive.

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timg
"engage the user and see if you can get the feature to a common ground"

Yes, this is what I'm asking. In direct marketing for example, there are ways
that success can be scientifically measured. I am wondering if any of you have
used more methodical approaches to improving applications -- or if it's just
guess and find out if it worked 2 months from now.

The reason for this is that I just don't always trust users to think deeply
enough of the problem for them to know what they want.

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dpapathanasiou
A great thing to do is invite your target users to try the app/service in your
presence.

But don't lead them or demo anything; just watch how they start, and what they
react to/don't understand.

We had a similar experience recently --
<http://blog.seeksift.com/2007/03/02/an-epiphany/> \-- and it did wonders for
our usability.

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tocomment
Seeksift looks cool. I was a little frusterated though when I clicked on the
blog and then couldn't find a way to click back to seeksift easily.

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dpapathanasiou
Thanks; let me know if you use it and what you think: good, bad, or ugly
(actually, _especially_ if it's either of the latter two categories, because
that's how we improve).

Thanks, too, for bringing up the point about the blog; there are probably ways
of customizing the header to point to SeekSift.com but I got a little
frustrated with Wordpress after I found out you can't change their favicon.

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yaacovtp
Scrap the idea. If they can't relate to it who will?

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timg
No. I didn't say that they don't like it and there have been no noticeable
bugs.

It was very well received by all of those who I heard from. The problem is
that the whole "release as early as possible and get user feedback quickly"
strategy has not been effective for me at all. My question is how I can get
better feedback from users, not how I can suck less.

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Wintermute
Post your Beta to Ycombinator news. No shortage of strong opinions here.

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staunch
I'm sure there'd be some really good responses, but most of us are probably
about as far from average internet users as it gets. It really depends on what
the product is though.

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juwo
fix your bugs and apologize to your users.

