This depends entirely on who the users are. If a fellow developer tells you something, listen to him! If someone who doesn't know what a CPU is tells you something, try to figure out what he really wants. But even then, if he tells you something simply doesn't work well for him, don't dismiss it as him not understanding your vision.
The problem with some projects (e.g. GNOME) is that they consider all feedback to be equally invalid, and the self-appointed "designers" are always right. This is the result of the Apple-inspired worship of almighty "design," and is contrary to the very idea of personal computing empowering people.
"Listen to fellow developers" can be very dangerous too. It's how you end up with programs that have menus nested 4 levels deep and thousands of options that will only be used by the developer who recommended/implemented it and a few other people (at huge cost to the other 99% of users).
Let me clarify my statement: you should of course ALSO listen to them (but you should take what is said with grain of salt and try to understand the real motives; once you understand that, you can propose other - often better - solutions).
However the real feedback comes from what is not said out loud. Users might dismiss the problems they have as their incompetence, but only you can be the judge of that. If 3 people in a row make the same mistakes, I can guarantee you it is not their incompetence you are seeing... ;) That is why observing the users is so important, much more than just listening to them.
But again it was skewed towards the people ready to take time to answser so the answser were mainly very enthusiastic which I know now doesn't represent the majority of the users
This seems like the Innovator's Dilemma as it relates to any product or service that can be used casually but also has "power users".
Power users are a mixed blessing.
Pros: they give you many ideas what to do. Often they're your best word-of-mouth evangelists.
Cons: If you take their requests too literally, they can drive the product/service into becoming something with too-narrow appeal and poor learnability. (However, if you don't listen to them, enough, they get mad and maybe you lose their evangelism, or worse it turns into anti-evangelism.)
That's the great thing about software: it can be configured to meet different needs at the same time. So tired of the "it can appeal to new users or power users" false dichotomy that drives all software toward the lowest common denominator. It's like the mindless, constant-growth dogma has spread from the stock market to software developers who care more about "market share" and mass appeal than craftsmanship and usefulness.
Although I agree it's possible (and so "dilemma" is hyperbole), in my own experience it's quite challenging to pile on the features while retaining a simpler experience for more casual users.
Realistically: The early-adopter power-users will want their new features relatively quickly. It takes significant discipline and foresight to add them in a way that won't complicate and compromise the simpler experience. Yes you can hide options, etc., but eventually the complexity can start poking through.
Of course that's just my experience as a developer and user of many programs; you may be smarter and/or luckier than me.
I agree. I can't tell you how many times I've heard about interesting web sites and checked them out only to find that I cannot do a single thing until I create an account. No demo, no trial, no nothing. Of course I just leave.
Well my point here kind of is: most people agree with you. But if you do the website fully without login wall , don't bother putting in an optional login. People like it better without anyway.
I kinda miss the old days of the web when downloading a demo meant only being spammed with newsletters and marketing emails. Now something as innocent as downloading a whitepaper means months of plaintive phone calls from inside sales drones pleading "this is the fourth time I've tried to reach you since you downloaded our whitepaper a month ago. I really need 15 minutes of your time...". No, you don't.
I dismissed Quora at first as a scammy/suspicious website after I arrived at a question there via Google and was afterwards required to login in order to see the answers.
Later I registered and saw that it's a really good website with quality content, but my first impression was not very good, precisely because of the obnoxious login wall.
You can add ?share=1 to their question URLS and read all the answers without logging in. I've used it quite a bit since I don't even enjoy logging into a site let alone signing up.
One shouldnt have to do that at first place.It's just a bad UX decision and serves little purpose.
People are going to register only if they want to interact with the website.
If I just want to read content,I shouldnt have to register.Stackoverflow made the right call and today it's infinitetly more popular than Quora will ever be.
I think Quora really wanted to be a private Q&A site, which imo is a legitimate choice in the space of possible communities. But then their results wouldn't get indexed on Google, and my guess is they decided that they needed organic search to get enough traffic to hit their revenue targets. So they have this grudgingly-sort-of-open results page so it gets indexed.
They don't have revenue targets. Quora is a zero revenue operation, they don't have a business model.
Quora just raised money at a billion dollar valuation basically. By comparison, Answers.com, a much larger site by traffic (with a $7+ cpm rate), was purchased for a mere $127 million, and was struggling to punch above $20 million in annual revenue.
Then you have to ask: what about Quora being worth $3+ billion, so their investors can get a return? There's no scenario that will ever get them there in the Q&A space (it'd require ~$300 million in revenue, literally impossible for them to pull off as is). They have to pivot out of Q&A because they can never justify their valuation, and they know it. To be worth that much they need to be a top 50 site in terms of traffic, and they're nowhere near that.
Wikia for example is substantially larger than Quora, and they couldn't even get close to justifying a multi-billion dollar valuation via advertising. Or consider Angie's List, worth $700 million, but tracking toward $300 million in revenue. Quora's investors have a huge problem ahead of them.
The other thing is they have Facebook's DNA where they constantly push the norms of user's expectations in the direction that they want. It feels slimy to geeks, but in a lot of ways it's the biggest story of the last decade of the web's evolution.
That's about as good as scrolling to the bottom of ExpertsExchange (what a terrible name). I refuse to sign in to read some Q/A. Quora is on my black list just as much as the EE.
That's the opposite of my experience ... I (apparently) started using Quora relatively early and finally requested that they cancel my account a few weeks ago. The sign-up process and amount of information they want to collect is now (what I consider) unreasonable.
What's more fun is when you've registered for a site then come back and can't find the tiny 'existing users' link to use the account you just signed up for.
I'm creating a MUD (text based multiplayer RPG) with Elixir using websockets instead of telnet. After reading the prior blog post I stripped out my account / character creation and converted to random URLs.
Game data like this starts out as being unimportant to the player when they're just dipping a toe, but as they get more invested it can become very important to them. I'm going to give players the ability to customize their URL to something more memorable / create a password to protect their URL / provide an email address to make it possible to reset a forgotten url or password. Those things will all be doable from within the game and are never mandatory, the player can decide when or if they care enough about their character to protect it.
As a bonus the account / character creation / login code was some of the worst code in the app so I was happy to delete it.
the users who remain silent are not too lazy to ask for something more, they just don't want anything
Or maybe they just give up without trying as they do not expect you to do much for a minority of the users. It's also possible that they give up and leave, becoming non-users.
No they do not become non-users. They are still coming. Hell, the site traffic has never been so high recently although more than 88% are returning visitors. They are just satisfied with what they signed up for at the beginning I think.
How do you know if the people coming this week are the same people who came last week? Just because overall site traffic is increasing doesn't mean you have a low churn rate.
I think that the generalizations in this article probably aren't true. It is cool to hear actual experience but the assumption that this applies to mine or any other person's side project or startup is a leap.
Specifically, I find his UX very chaotic and confusing. More people may sign up if it made more sense? I'm also not sure what benefit there is to creating an account? Further, the fact that 30 people gave him the feedback and 30 people made the account is more likely coincidence than anything. Also wait a week or two weeks or more, and the number of account will probably grow well past 30. And I definitely believe that people do not give feedback but actually wish there was some different feature or functionality. Most people just aren't going to take the time to actually send a feedback request.
Your post was excellent, I was just considering the same. Creating a real account instead of just using the shared secret. But now it seems it isn't worth of doing. - Thanks!
What I hate even more than registering? Sites which can't be properly accessed and evaluated before registering. Hacker News should redirect all non logged in users to this login page from all pages: https://news.ycombinator.com/newslogin?whence=news This is site X, we're really cool, register now. Exactly same rule applies to all of those crappy mobile apps. I want to know what it is all about well enough, before installing it, or I won't install it at all.
Out of approximately 700 registrations (Specific client, specific event), 4 called in asking where to register. The problem was that those 4 users didn't realize you had to scroll past the fold to find the registration form.
We had to optimize the site (displaying animating indicators) to let that small minority of users know that there is more content past the fold.
In this situation it's hard to argue when you're dealing with a client that sells million dollar homes, because what if one of those 4 users is a potential buyer.
It's great to hear from you again. When I saw the feature on nospronos, I thought that maybe your authentification strategy was not giving good enough results. Sounds like I was wrong.
Did you try to know why they wanted a real account in the first place? Was it because they kept loosing their secret URL? If yes, a resend feature via email would have done the trick.
Anyway kudos for the website, we are having great funs with our (mostly wrong) predictions.
Did you try to see how close from reality have been your best user?
It's great to see decisions that are made via metrics. I've only got one issue with the post:
"Feature requests have to be normalized by the total number of daily users on the site -> the users who remain silent are not too lazy to ask for something more, they just don't want anything."
I tend to think the users who don't provide feedback are those who are too lazy and/or don't want anything. Either way you can't listen to someone who's "silent".
Yes I agree, my point was that these silent user can be a majority and they seem like they really enjoy your site too, coming back each day and all. But in the end, when you introduce a new feature most of them (in my case close to 100% of them) will ignore it and stick to what they first came in for. That's why I propose to "normalize" by the daily active users...
These are valid remarks, but a major factor is the nature of the website. The world cup is hugely popular and will end in a few days. It wouldn't even make sense for most users to sign up for a website that will be used every 4 years. On the other hand, if your site needs users' contribution, and the ability to attribute them to them, registrations are way to go.
You would still be able to attribute a contribution to the visitor of the secret link. What lacks for a longer use is the ability to recover a lost secret url.
We would need to invent a system, that would uniquely identify a user say with a name which we will call "username" and a secret message which we will call "password".
We could call it something like "basic authentication".
"Users came to your site for a reason or a receipe that you did right somehow, so stick to it." Agree. Always be listening to feedback, but balance it with data and your gut-feeling. If you're building something for you as user, listen mostly to your gut. I've learned that the hard way.
Is it because 30 people typed text like "how do I create an account" and you interpreted it to mean "I want an account"? And even if they did explicitly say they want an account, which force made you interpret that to mean what they said?
No I was absolutely not planning on adding real accounts. But people went ahead and wrote me emails asking for the feature:
Example: "Good job for a draft website. Personally I'm playing in different leagues and I'd really appreciate to have an account to avoid multiple input and multiple links ..."
This is what made me think it was a real need in the community, which was clearly wrong.
You could avoid multiple input and multiple links with cookies. That wouldn't require a login.
Users might not even know what a cookie is, so they don't ask for one and instead they say the simplest thing that comes to mind: an account. They don't know what the options are in technology. They barely know what they need, and they most definitely don't know what they want.
People do not know what they want. They barely know what
they need, but they definitely do not know what they
want. They're conditioned by the limited imagination of
what is possible.
- Massimo Vignelli
That strikes me as arrogance. Henry Ford's famous quote is taken as dogma, and the almighty designer is worshipped, the one who deigns to figure out what the clueless user really wants and give it to him. This is especially bad when the user in question is asking to have something restored which had been removed in the name of design. Or the same could be said about "developers": those clueless users will take what we give them, and they'll like it! This is the mindset that leads to the widely hated redesigns of Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, Google+ integration, etc. It's almost like a new caste system in the online world.
> This is the mindset that leads to the widely hated redesigns of Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, Google+ integration, etc.
Pretty sure all these companies are heavily A/B testing every change they make, and would immediately abandon any new design if it decreased engagement or retention even slightly.
These changes are "hated" by a vocal minority who loves to complain about change to show how much the liked the old version. They don't quit using the product, though. And if you ask their opinion again even three months later (which is another thing big companies tend to do), they'll have completely forgotten what the difference was between the two.
Of course, some people do quit a service after any given change, no matter how innocuous—they just disappear without saying anything. But changes, even change for change's sake, also tends to increase signups. So in practice, it's just a question of whether the positives outweigh the negatives of the change. And only real usage data can answer that, not customer surveys—and especially not customer exit surveys.
Maybe the correct view is that no one, whether users or designers, is always right or always wrong. The important thing is to try things out, see what happens, then adapt and try again. To generalise based on the past successes or failures of users or designers is probably a mistake.
I really wish I could provide some A/B testing statistics, I really would. But in the timeframe of the Worldcup, a relatively small user base and doing this a side project only this seems a bit challenging. However you make a very good point.
people who give you feedback are the "fans", core users, who you're supposed to make the happiest and who'll stick around the longest, - says the old wisdom.
- not what the user wants at all
- what the user thinks they want, but so poorly described as to be impossible to implement
- what the user thinks they want, but actually doesn't
- what the user wants, but also a terrible idea that will make your thing worse for everyone else
There are ways to get useful feedback from your users, but asking them to tell you what they want is probably the worst one.