[btilly]

If you want other people to use it, it does apply. You don't know what you don't know until you have user feedback. No matter how much is right about your vision, you need that.

This is WHY the idea of having an MVP and iterating has won so thoroughly.

[ablanco]

Don't get me wrong, if you are to measure success by the money you raise, then I completely agree with you. I meant thinking of an app as a mean of expression rather than a cow to squeeze money from. If you want to make something more in the arts department, getting people to tell you what they think early on might be a horrible and non constructive idea.

[apsurd]

This is underappreciated. Art and expression is a value in and of itself. I don't think it's a cop out to think this way. However, creating something is in fact complicated and retreating to "I'm just making art" is an easy justification to fool yourself into being ok with failing if what you're trying to do is build a profitable business.

But it remains: art and expression is valuable.

Yes I can probably make more money optimizing advertising attribution. But, honestly, I think there's some art in all of us. It's ok to explore it.

[btilly]

I don't care whether you are writing it for money, open source, or simply to make the world a better place. If the purpose of your work involves other people appreciating it, you won't know what they will and will not appreciate it until you put it in front of other people and get feedback about it.

[ablanco]

I think this is a discussion about building stuff.

When the idea is just taking form I think getting too many people involved is a mistake. All you need is 2/3 people really invested in the idea. For example: unix

When the idea is near completion I think it's really good to get all the feedback you can.

[gitgud]

I agree, software that is designed for users must be tested as soon as possible.

Humans are notoriously bad predictors. For example; That fancy menu system you spent a week making might be completely useless to most users, simple user feedback could have prevented the colossal waste of time...

[mlthoughts2018]

One caveat though is that in many situations, there is a lot of bureaucracy and overhead involved with collecting and interpreting user feedback. User feedback is often inconsistent and contradictory, influenced by mistakes in survey design, influenced by time-varying factors. And once it is collected, a lot of different stakeholders inside the company will have conflicting incentives about what the feedback is supposed to mean for priorities and decisions.

In some cases, if someone has a very highly developed sense of aesthetics and design, or can extrapolate from previous user feedback scenarios, then they might be able to come up with designs that users will love even if users wouldn't have thought of it that way ahead of time, or if more generic feedback would never have collated down into actionable decisions that empowered that particular designer.

As I've gone on in my career, I tend to see the value of this more and more, and lose faith that feedback collection mechanisms won't be politically subverted.

One example: I'd say a lot of the feedback about the principal lines of work for TensorFlow from the recent dev summit is wrong-headed, and they should just let Francois Chollet's design aesthetic motivate what gets worked on and how it gets designed, for a while.