Focus on User Input for Software Product Development
Market research, competitive analysis, and futuristic thinking continue to play important roles in determining what software products and applications to develop. They also can help decide what features should be incorporated based on the level of quality that can be achieved within a software company’s core constraints of time, cost, and available resources. At the end of the day, all of this boils down in simple terms to “what the end user really thinks and wants.”
Steve Jobs famously said he didn’t do any market research when designing the Mac computer. Despite his success, Forbes cautions that it’s dangerous to take away the lesson that user feedback may impede an organization’s creative thinking. Ignoring user feedback probably won’t work for all companies, either. The right mix of innovative thinking and end user feedback incorporation is important for an organization to thrive.
Granted that end user feedback is important, it is heartening that the days of ineffective and cumbersome feedback gathering are long gone. End users have become very vocal in sharing their feedback about a product and its quality—the good, the bad, or the ugly.
Thanks to advancements in social computing technologies, the voice of the end user is further strengthened and spreads quickly worldwide. In a recent case, YouTube faced strong resistance from end users who now have to integrate Google+ accounts to use its commenting system. Similar to YouTube, Facebook received strong feedback recently about a feature change to account security settings for teenage users.
Users may voluntarily share their feedback, but they are not all equally vocal, calling for additional tools to help understand input from uncommunicative users. On the other hand, vocal users may have voluminous input to share, making it difficult and ineffective for organizations to sift through feedback manually. Fortunately, technology has made this easy too, with ample tools to help gather and analyze end user feedback.
Because end user feedback is important to a product, companies are adopting new strategies: asking for feedback from end users early on, involving them in beta testing before release, rolling out features to a select set of users before making those features available to a larger group, and opening the doors all in one go to the entire user base.
Whatever the strategy adopted, a company needs to be nimble enough to act on user feedback responsively and responsibly; this is what makes an organization's operation truly agile. It will be interesting to see how YouTube and Facebook react to the user input they have been receiving and whether they will be agile in the process.
