Yes, I constantly advocate ignoring users. No, I don’t mean you should ignore them forever. I mean that you should avoid letting users guide your design. I mean you should stick to your own vision and focus on supporting an activity instead of an audience.

Once you’ve done that, feel free to start listening to your users. Just don’t act on anything until you’ve listened to a lot of them, filtered out all the really nasty comments, and looked past the ranting to see the little nuggets of truth that exist there.

It’s our job to figure out which comments should actually compel changes in our apps. It’s up to us to decide how to deal with conflicting wishes, conflicting feedback, and so on.

Yesterday, I heard two comments about the same application, in response to the same survey question. The question was, “What do you like the most about the new version?”. One answer went like this:

“Nothing. The old one worked just fine and didn’t look like dog
vomit. Fire the idiot that came up with this piece of junk. Absolutely
unusable.”

The other went like this:

“The new interface plain out rocks. It runs faster, and is much more
intuitive. I really like how you have a tool bar, but always know what
you are working on and those things stick around. It behaves more like
an application that a stateful webpage, which is a huge plus. Thanks
Guys, keep up the good work!”

The only way to decide which person to listen to is to measure these comments against all the others, filter out the rants, and look for the truth behind the comments. Some of them are legitimate complaints, and some are legitimate compliments, but you need to look hard to determine which is really which so you can decide what to do with the information.

On a related note, Kathy is talking keeping our emotions in check while reading some of these comments.

Posted by Robert on November 21st, 2006