I’ve long maintained that you should avoid listening to users while designing new products. I believe this because users are historically very bad at communicating exactly what they want, and because this information is very easy to misinterpret.

I have also long maintained that once you have a product available, you should then plug in and start listening to your audience. In doing this, however, I’ve said you should pay attention to the overwhelming trends - the requests that bubble up to the top over and over again - and not the idiosynracies of individual or small niches of users.

But an article put out by the Opera desktop team reveals that it can be dangerous to listen to users even when a huge number of them request the same thing.

From the article:

“A preference we added by popular request, the ability to turn on Fit to Width by default, is used by 0.0% [of users].”

Clearly, even paying attention to trends can be risky. I’ve seen this myself in a couple of situations. It seems that a large number of people can all have the same wrong idea.

This is why I’ve also long maintained that you should pay the most attention to how people actually use computers. The best way to do this is to watch them, and to watch the stats. Keep track of click paths, click stats, error messages, and anything else you can get your hands on, and couple that with the insights you gain from watching people use computers, the web, your app, and so on.

Our job as designers is to interpret and define problems, and to create solutions. Very often this means gnoring everything you hear and paying attention only to what you see. When you pay attention to what people actually do instead of what they say they do, you can devise solutions that exceed their expectations.

Instead of building exactly what they ask for, figure out why they’re asking for it. Then find a solution that solves the real problem.

Posted by Robert on July 6th, 2007