User feedback is essential for software development, but it can also be challenging to manage and prioritize. How can you balance user feedback with your own vision for software development, without compromising quality, functionality, or creativity? In this article, we will explore some tips and strategies to help you achieve this balance.
Before you collect and analyze user feedback, you need to understand who your users are, what they need, and what they expect from your software. You can use various methods to research your user personas, such as interviews, surveys, observations, or analytics. By understanding your users, you can design your software to meet their goals, preferences, and pain points, and also filter out irrelevant or contradictory feedback.
Your vision is the guiding principle that shapes your software development. It is the core value proposition that you offer to your users and the market. You need to define your vision clearly and communicate it to your team, stakeholders, and users. Your vision should be based on your research, expertise, and innovation, and it should align with your business objectives and strategy. By defining your vision, you can set the direction and scope of your software development, and also justify your decisions and trade-offs.
User feedback is the input that you receive from your users about your software, such as their opinions, suggestions, complaints, or praises. You can collect user feedback through various channels, such as surveys, reviews, ratings, comments, emails, or social media. You can also use tools such as user testing, usability testing, or A/B testing to measure user behavior and satisfaction. You need to analyze user feedback to identify patterns, trends, and insights that can help you improve your software. You should also categorize and prioritize user feedback based on its relevance, urgency, and impact.
User feedback is not only a source of information, but also a source of action. You need to implement user feedback that aligns with your vision and adds value to your software. You can use agile methodologies, such as scrum or kanban, to plan, execute, and deliver user feedback in short iterations. You should also validate user feedback by testing and measuring its effects on your software performance, quality, and user satisfaction. You should also communicate with your users about the changes and updates that you make based on their feedback.
User feedback and vision are not mutually exclusive, but rather complementary. To find the optimal point of meeting user needs and expectations while delivering your unique value proposition and competitive advantage, you must balance user feedback and vision. To do this, be user-centric but not user-driven. Listen to users, but use your judgment and expertise to filter and interpret their feedback. Be flexible but not indecisive; adapt to feedback, but don't change your software development with every new piece of feedback. Be responsive but not reactive; respond to feedback, but don't rush to implement it without proper analysis and validation. Finally, be collaborative but not dependent; collaborate with users, but don't rely on them to solve software development problems--use their feedback as a resource instead.
At Amazon one leadership principle is customer obsession. It is simultaneously dead right and dead wrong. Being obsessed by your customers is dead right. You should work to build things that they will love and use with delight. You can only do this if you really understand your customers - who they are, what problems they want solved, why these problems are important to them. Following slavishly what they tell you about your product as you build it is dead wrong. Customers don’t know with a product what is right and what is wrong until they use it at work. Ask too early and your user experience will end up as a cluttered irritating mishmash of pablum trying to explain things to the customer. Ask what they want, give them what they need.
User model As far as we know, we are cognitive beings meaning that, when we use software, we have some idea in our head of what the system does. When we don’t, we are lost and the software is always perplexing to use. I call this the “User Model” and having a clear definition of what it is and how to keep it as simple as possible is key in my opinion to good software. In a spreadsheet for example the user model is sheets. Sheets are addressable grids containing cells. Cells contain either values or expressions that compute using using other cells as input to the expression. That, my friends, is a very simple user model. As a result over a billion people use spreadsheets although at widely differing levels of sophistication.