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

Re:You launched early and your users' feedback is all useles... by cyu on Tuesday April 17, 2007 @04:31PM (#13755)

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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Re:You launched early and your users' feedback is all useles... by timg on Tuesday April 17, 2007 @05:17PM (#13785)

"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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Re:You launched early and your users' feedback is all useles... by dpapathanasiou on Tuesday April 17, 2007 @05:40PM (#13800)

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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Re:You launched early and your users' feedback is all useles... by tocomment on Tuesday April 17, 2007 @07:38PM (#13873)

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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Re:You launched early and your users' feedback is all useles... by dpapathanasiou on Wednesday April 18, 2007 @09:27AM (#14061)

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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