Listening to users is bad.

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2008/11/19/listening-to-users-is-bad/

by iloveyouocean • 18 years ago

39 19 18 years ago

plentyoffish.wordpress.com

Name me a single hugely successful internet company that is driven and built by user suggestions.

Flickr? Craigslist?

To create something game changing you have to be like apple, you just build interesting stuff and test it on users until you find something that works and then you release it to everyone.

How will we know if it works if you don't listen to the users? Quantitative information always benefits from qualitative feedback. It's really not enough to know what's successful if we can't tell how or why it's successful.

Also, the advice from almost anybody creating new and interesting products is to place yourself in the shoes of the user and build things that you yourself would find useful. Who should we be listening to then?

defunkt• 18 years ago

I think he's saying "ignore what your users say, pay attention to what they do." User testing is seeing what they do, listening to suggestions on a forum is listening to what they say.

neilk• 18 years ago

It's a mix. You can try out what they say if it seems like a good idea to you. But the only test is whether it changes user behavior or drives signups or whatever.

edw519• 18 years ago

Mistitled.

Probably should have been, "To create something game changing, listening to users is bad."

For the other 99%, ignore your users at your own peril.

markessien• 18 years ago

He's right. Software design is art, software development is a craft. You can't create art by consensus. You need creative people, and the creative people need to be in-sync with each other.

Movies don't have 10 directors.

timcederman2• 18 years ago

An important skill as a designer is to learn how to filter user feedback. This cannot be underestimated.

Then pay attention to how they react to it.

timcederman2• 18 years ago

Oh, and Google listen VERY closely to what their users say. I've been involved in several user studies there, and qualitative feedback is huge to them.

patio11• 18 years ago

Well, he does run a dating site with millions of users and a staff of 1.5. He couldn't listen to users even if he wanted to. Additionally, the majority of his users are transients (online dating = if you are successful using the product you should never be back) and any long-term user community he builds up is almost pathological by definition (see earlier point).

Contrast this with your typical business: your best customers are the ones who join early and stay forever. Customers have an interest in the site/software continuing to evolve because they anticipate they will continue using it. Long-term customers are excellent sources of feedback because expertise with your problem domain is something to be sought after and carefully cultivated, rather than a black mark.

iloveyouocean• 18 years ago

(online dating = if you are successful using the product you should never be back) and any long-term user community he builds up is almost pathological by definition

Or so goes the conventional "Your success is your own un-doing." online dating industry mantra. Most sites today are so terrible that a user is forced to run a near endless gauntlet of trials and tribulations before they meet anyone remotely suitable. This leads to a scarcity mentality which many people react to by 'latching on' to the first acceptable person. As a corollary, many people think that online daters are only in it to search for 'the right one.'

But in reality, most online daters would in fact like to meet "the reasonable 10" and have some options to choose from. That was our thinking behind http://flowmingle.com . We wanted to lower the cost of finding a reasonable person and setting up a date, and make going on a date a likely and regular event.

In this way, yes, your customers eventually leave, but in the meantime they have had a good experience and will come back if they need to. The supply of single people is endless and lucrative for an effective site that treats their customers well.

spolsky• 18 years ago

anecdote! w00t! victory lap

aneesh• 18 years ago

Agreed. I have another bone to pick with this article as well.

"X is bad. You must do Y to succeed."

Absolute statements like this are almost always dangerous to make, and I don't trust the articles that make them. Success or failure at anything is all about making the right tradeoffs. Advice should focus on helping you weigh those tradeoffs intelligently rather than dictating absolutes.

But dictating absolutes is so much easier, and I guess that's why everyone does it.

mjnaus• 18 years ago

>>Success or failure at anything is all about making the right tradeoffs. Advice should focus on helping you weigh those tradeoffs intelligently rather than dictating absolutes.

Very well said indeed!

LPTS• 18 years ago

"Advice should focus on helping you weigh those tradeoffs intelligently rather than dictating absolutes."

is the best thing I remember reading on YC. I've read books that were less profound then that sentence. I always thought that, but as a newbie inventor/entrepreneur, it's good to have put so succinctly and up front.

blader• 18 years ago

There are no absolutes in this. Listening to users blindly while ignoring your quantitative metrics is bad. Ignoring user sentiment and relying solely on quantitative metrics is also bad. The art is in how you use the two types of data to inform your product decisions.

paul9290• 18 years ago

We user uservoice feedback tab and react to the top two to three suggestions that get up voted.

Like 500 people suggested and agreed about X. Definitely want to listen to that!

mattmaroon• 18 years ago

Why do people listen to this guy? He's got the English skills of a third-grader (though he does seem to be improving). He built a really bad site (even by online dating standards I'm told) and spammed it until the network effect took over. Yet a lot of people take his words as the gospel just because he gets a big AdSense check.

greyman• 18 years ago

I personally don't take his words as the gospel, but I have no problem to admit, that I will listen to him "just because he gets a big AdSense check". Because "just getting big Adsense check" isn't that easy to do, especially with a "bad site". ;-)

shiranaihito• 18 years ago

> He's got the English skills of a third-grader

I thought English wasn't his native language, but maybe it actually is after all!

But then again, even in the comments in this thread, there's yet another guy who wrote "then" when he was (hopefully) aiming for "than". Too bad spell-checkers won't save you from that one. Not that I've ever used one.

Once again, I refrained from reprimanding him because this is HN and we're supposed to be a bit more understanding here.

I'll take this opportunity to point out, though, that one would have to be stone-cold retarded to pull off a grammatically equivalent mistake in my native language, Finnish.

sunkencity• 18 years ago

we'll he's onto something, but that doesn't mean you don't have to listen. The most active users are often several hundred percent more active than the average joe. In fact, there's no relevance of the "average" user because the the user pattern doesn't follow a bell curve, it's a power law. Check out http://www.extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter%20Three-Shi... for some interesting math on many-to-many people networks.

Listening to users is bad.

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