Ever tried getting real and actionable feedback from users of a software product? On the surface it sounds pretty easy to do. You could call them up. You could send an email. You could give them a survey. Heck there are lots of ways to go about it. And if you have resources, hiring third party marketing and survey firms gives even more options. Surely folks using your software would want to help in making it better. Surely they would be eager to provide feedback. After all, they are a stakeholder! They actually use the product! In the words of the infamous Lee Corso, "Not so fast my friends".
Sure some folks are more inclined than others to complain when your software gives them a headache, but most people will close surveys before they are even finished opening. Most have so much email these days that keeping up with solicited email takes so much time that unsolicited stuff doesn't stand much of a chance of being read, much less actually responded to. Phone calls actually do work. People are surprisingly willing to talk if they give you a real phone number. It takes a lot of time though and the folks you reach are most often happy users. Their feedback is good for sure, but they probably don't hold the answers you are really looking for. The users I am most interested in are the ones I can't call and probably aren't interested in giving feedback. I want the users who gave up on our software. I want to know precisely the point in time during the evaluation that the decision was made to kick it to the curb and try another solution. Why did they decide the product wouldn't work for them? What problem do they have that we didn't solve? This is the feedback that I need. And the sooner I get it the better. Correction usually comes with adding the right features, or more often than you might think, making existing features more obvious and discoverable.
In the early spreadsheet days, Lotus 123 was far and away the leader of the pack. When Microsoft created Excel they created a product that rivaled Lotus in features and abilities. Eventually Excel became a significantly better spreadsheet product yet it hadn't quite taken off yet. Feedback from users said that they preferred Excel, but they couldn't switch because they needed to share their work with colleagues who almost ubiquitously used Lotus. That's the feedback Microsoft needed. At that point Excel could import Lotus files but what it needed to be able to do was Save As Lotus files. A hundred new math features would not have been more effective than just one feature that would remove the primary barrier for integration. Perhaps for Microsoft it was always obvious that they needed this feature to succeed and it wasn't there simply because it hadn't been developed yet. But too often the obvious isn't so obvious. Real user feedback has a strong knack for aiming the spotlight on the not so obvious obvious.
I recently came across User Voice and was immediately impressed with what this service offers. When I conduct a requirements workshop there is always a voting phase. We put up all of the ideas generated in the workshop sessions on a wall and give participants colored sticky dots that sum to a specific vote total. Everyone gets to "spend" their dots on what they think is important. Everyone has to vote, though I never have to make them. They want to participate in the vote because they know the results of the vote prioritize the ideas. Participants who don't even contribute a single idea know which of the presented ideas they think are important and they are eager to vote on them. User Voice brings this concept directly to the entire user base and I couldn't help but think that this might well be another not so obvious obvious. We have a forum, we have email, and we call users but nowhere can a user just vote on ideas that are present without telling me who they are or actually taking time to write something. Perhaps that desire to want to vote will be present with a user voice forum as well. We are about to release our new product AppLife DNA and we are going to try User Voice. Will this new forum style give me that all so important, "this is why I didn't choose your product" feedback? Probably not. But over time perhaps better decisions will be made on what is actually important as opposed to what we think is important. If this happens often enough, we might sooner get to a product that provides more value for users than the available alternatives and we'll lose fewer evaluators.