Getting feedback from users can be an invaluable way to determine how your product is viewed by its audience. But it’s important to understand some of the pitfalls with user feedback before you start allowing comments to shape your product strategy.
1. Not everyone likes change
There’s a running joke that whenever Facebook changes something, people are up in arms for a week or two – maybe not even that. After that initial period, we get used to the change. Sometimes, negative feedback may be purely down to the fact we don’t like change. If you’re going to ask for feedback, don’t do it immediately after a big release.
2. People are more likely to give negative feedback
Negative feedback can be a good way to measure if a recent change has annoyed users. Unfortunately, a lot of people won’t give any feedback at all – including those who are happy with a change. Don’t take negative feedback to mean you need to reverse a recent change.
3. One-off comments may not help anyone else
If one person asks for something, don’t jump on that task immediately. If it’s a good idea and you can make a change as a result of their feedback, it’s something to consider. However, if you react to every comment without considering if it’s right for the product, you may end up with a product with a sprawling feature set, and that pleases an extremely narrow group of users – the most vocal ones.
4. New designs need time to bed in
A new design can attract a lot of comments – most of them are purely down to opinion. Issues such as elements overlapping, fonts being too small, or scaling not working across different screen sizes are important things to fix. Beyond that, aesthetics shouldn’t be up for debate.
5. People don’t know what they want
If you ask 100 users of your product what they want from it, the collective feedback may be a laundry list of missing features. In fact, your best change could be something that nobody even thought of. You are in control of product strategy – find things that people didn’t even know they wanted. Make the product quicker and easier to use.
6. Surveys can help – but be careful what you wish for
A user feedback survey can give you a limited set of feedback on the questions of your choosing. But don’t ask for things you don’t want to do. “Should we build an app?” is a pointless question if you have no intention of building one.
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