| > One of the many issues is you only get tot talk to customers willing to honestly talk to you. In the late 2000s I was part of a team that was developing some pretty incredible software to help chip designers manage the added complexity as features got smaller (context: our customers were freaking out about how hard it looked like 45nm was going to be). We did all of these customer satisfaction surveys and shit like that and got... some decent feedback but mostly just all rainbows and unicorns positive reviews. Chip design software is complex and every customer of ours needed some custom integration, which is where my small group came in: the three of us were dual-degree EE/CS folks. We could sit down with the chip designers and understand their workflow and then go back to our hotel room at night and write the integration code to connect our tool with whatever bespoke workflow they had internally. All of that story leading up to the main point: The feedback I got talking to random people outside in the smoking area was dramatically more valuable than anything we got from our customer surveys. This wasn't a strategy, I'd just go out for a smoke every hour or two to smoke and there'd usually be a couple of employees out there doing the same. "Hey, I don't recognize you, are you new?" "Oh, no, I'm here helping with the $X integration" "Oh! Hey so maybe you can help me then... in the latest release it looks like feature $X should be able to do $Y but I can't seem to get it to work..." Pretty much every time I went outside I ended up learning something new, either an interesting way our software was being used or misused, or some other detail about how these guys' day-to-day workflow worked that we hadn't even thought of addressing. We had some customers in Japan, too, where there's a an interesting social hierarchy when having business meetings. Me and the junior engineer across the table couldn't talk to each other directly in the meetings, all of the questions had to go through my manager, and a translator, and a senior manager on the other side of the table... in a big game of telephone even though we were in the same room. After the meeting I would usually go have a smoke and just happen to find the junior guy from the meeting doing the same. "You know, I do speak English... and have a few questions if you don't mind me asking directly" :D While I can't recommend picking up a persistent nicotine addiction for doing better user research, I also can't say that I've ever encountered a more organic way to get really good unfiltered user feedback. Surveys, user studies, focus groups, etc... they're all decent tools to varying degrees but don't always get the level of honesty you can get out of someone sharing 5 minutes with you in the smoker's corner. |