Should you ever NOT listen to user feedback?

User feedback is always right. Right?

Well…yes, and no.

Product designers are faced with a flood of feedback each day that can take many forms, from direct feature requests from customers, to feature ideas from sales reps on your team, to complaints via email, rating websites, and social media, customer service tickets, and more.

User feedback is always a valuable source of information. But if product designers aren’t careful, user feedback can quickly become a to-do list of features organized by who has yelled the loudest and most often. This not only runs the risk of pulling a product team in dozens of different directions, but also can create a product that is designed by consensus rather than clear vision and a muddied user experience.

The antidote to being overwhelmed by user feedback is a strong product vision and the product designer’s ability to separate the most important insights from the sea of feedback.

Betty Crocker’s instant cake mixes are a famous example of finding a “million-dollar product insight” hidden inside negative user feedback that — if taken at face value — would have likely caused the product to be shelved (pun definitely intended). The initial customer reaction to the “instant baking mixes” was terrible. Their target customers were mothers, in an era when stay-at-home mothers who spent a great deal of their time cooking were the norm. The test audience said hated the product. It made them feel like they weren’t really baking, or like they were “taking short cuts”. By listening to the insight (“It’s important to me to feel like I really baked this cake for my family”) and not the words (“I hated this product”), the product designers found an incredible insight.

They realized that by removing the powdered eggs from the mix and requiring the addition of a freshly cracked egg to the batter, their customers would feel more like they truly baked the cake. The fact that Betty Crocker mixes line the baking shelves at every grocery store is an indication of how successful the initially-hated product became after uncovering this insight about the way customers experienced the product.

Don’t just listen to what your customers are saying; look for the unexpected insights hidden in their words.

1. Look to customers to find problems, not solutions.

When customers (or potential customers) ask for specific features, very often they request features that they are used to having in other products. Replicating other companies’ features is unlikely to lead to a truly great, differentiated product. Rather than taking a “feature request” at face value, use a feature request as a jumping off point for deeper research to identify why they made that feature request.

A range of research methods can work to extract the “insight” behind the feature request “feedback”, but one of the most effective are simply user interviews. Meet with customers and ask them to explain why they are asking for the feature.

While they explain, look to identify the problem they are trying to solve with this feature. Very likely, multiple user “feature requests” that you’ve heard are actually all tied to the same need or problem. If you can find this “root” problem, you can find a root level solution that may address many “feature requests” at once.

2. Look at “silent” sources of insights

Some of the most valuable insights about your product are “silent”, locked in the things people do, not in the things they say.

• Look for ‘Cowpaths’: A cowpath is an “accidental” pathway that shows where people actually walked, rather than following paved sidewalks. In design, this concept is used to refer to observing user behavior to find the “paths” that users really want. Look for ways your customers are using your product in ways that you didn’t intend. For example, my company recently rolled out a new feature allowing instructors to post polls within discussion questions, after observing that people were posting questions with poll options manually written out in text in their posts. An observed behavior like this is a powerful indication of what users really need.
• Interview people that churn: Arguably the most meaningful source of insights about your product isn’t found in feedback from your ‘users’ at all. It’s in your former users…the ones that tried your product, and then stopped using it. These people believed in the concept of the product enough that they were willing to go through the behavior change and challenge of adopting a new product. If they stop using your product, it’s an indication that their experience of the product didn’t align with their expectation. The delta between “real experience” and “expectation” is how people measure their satisfaction with an experience, and also a trove of insights about how the product can be improved. Since an exceptional SaaS (software as a service) customer retention rate is 90% and above, that still means 1 in 10 people who care enough to try that product stop using it. Find those people and understand why.

3. When to listen to feedback, and when to not listen

Knowing when to not listen to the feedback you receive is as important as knowing when to listen. If your company is trying to do something truly innovative and different than what people are used to, and you asked the public if they would hypothetically want that product, many people would be likely to say “no”. Changing behavior is notoriously hard, and doing something truly different always changes behavior.

Imagine asking if people would want a platform where they can write 140 character long text-only messages and send them out on the internet, at a time when blogs were popular. Despite its popularity today, it’s very likely Twitter would have gotten mostly head-scratches and eye-rolls as feedback initially, with a few enthusiastic responses who saw the potential for what it could be.

Truly “different” products experience what is known as the “technology lifecycle curve”, a bell curve with “innovators”on the far left and “laggards” on the far right. When launching something new and different, understanding the profile of the people giving you feedback can be essential for extracting meaningful insights. See how visionaries react to the future direction of your product to understand its potential. Learn from people who typically are later stage adopters to understand what your product would need to add to reach the ‘majority’ of the market. But don’t confuse a “laggards” lack of enthusiasm for an emerging product with a lack of value or potential. The more your solution seeks to change user behavior, the more skillful a product designer must be in analyzing not what they hear in feedback, but also understanding the profile of the person providing the feedback.

Every innovation — whether a small improvement to the usability of a feature, or the creation of a generation-defining product — is borne out of finding an insight about a root problem that real people are experiencing. Knowing how to separate feedback “symptoms” from “causes” is the key skill for being able to design the simplest, most innovative solutions.

You just have to know how to “crack” the feedback code.

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Further Reading