Feedback and collaboration are wonderful, important topics and they have passionate advocates. If you develop your offer with your customers you get better, more satisfying and more profitable products and services.
But.
There’s always a but, isn’t there? It’s not fair. Yesterday I was writing about how you should collaborate and work with your readers, now I’m saying there are times you should ignore them. I wish there was a hard-and-fast, do-this-and-you’ll-always-be-right rule, but there never seem to be any.
Feedback won’t help you build something radically different
User feedback would never have created the Aeron chair. (Malcolm Gladwell wrote a whole chapter about this in his excellent book Blink.) It wasn’t an incremental improvement, it was a completely novel design. It didn’t look like any chair that had come before it.
There were survey groups: they had nothing to compare it with, and no frame of reference on how to think about it. All of them hated it.
If the designers had listened to their users, they would never have produced the chair. Fortunately, they decided to ignore the user feedback and sell it anyway. It’s won some seriously impressive awards, started a new design aesthetic for chairs (more and more designs that look like Aeron knock-offs), and sold a lot of chairs.
So user feedback will help you design a new product or service if it’s similar to something they already know. They can tell you if they would like dark chocolate instead of milk, half-hour sessions instead of hour-long, extra-large or medium.
But if you are making something totally new, something they don’t have a frame of reference for? Your users will say “It’s ugly” or “It’s too complicated”, but what they really mean is “I don’t get it.”
(Quoth Henry Ford: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”)
You have to know your customers intimately, understand their needs, and then ignore their first reaction when you bring out a really new product or service. You can’t test revolutionary ideas beforehand. You have to put them out there, patiently wait for your customers to get used to the idea and try it out, and then ask them what they think about it. That’s scary and frustrating. But it’s really the only way to build remarkable, awesome, game-changing stuff.
Your five-minute mission, should you choose to accept it…
Spend a couple of minutes writing down totally off-the-wall ideas that your customers would vigorously reject. Repeat every month. If you come up with a revolutionary idea? Fly that flag of revolution, comrade!
Ever had an idea that you thought was great but was rejecting as being too different? Tell me in the comments!