Approach customer-suggested features with caution
When your customers complain about bugs or usability issues, you should fix them. When your customers ask you for new features, 90% of the time you shouldn’t put them on your product roadmap.
Why?
- You already have it - they just can’t find it. In every single usability test I’ve ever watched (for my products or others), at least one consumer has asked for a feature that already existed. Most of the time, the information architecture has failed the consumer so that they never found it.
- You already have it - and it’s not that great. Alternatively, the feature could provide sufficiently low value that consumers don’t realize they’re already using it (or tried it, abandoned it, and forgot). I remember reading a number of “voice of the customer” requests for email alerts in a product I worked on. Upon further exploration it became clear that many of them were already receiving email alerts - but received so many that they were ignoring them
- About 5 people will actually use it. What percentage of your audience uses your product regularly? Of them, what percentage is significantly invested in your product that they think up new features? Of them, what percentage take the time to compose an email or post with their suggestion? Most feedback comes from a self-selecting power user audience who is willing to leap substantial obstacles for more functionality.
- You’re adding complexity along with features - and often hidden costs. The folks at 37signals have a great post about “every time you add something, you take something away.” Your customer may not realize what is making their product experience worse, but they can feel the decline. Internally, the hours spent writing functional specifications and code are visible and planned for, but the extra time spent testing, documenting, demoing, updating sales, and providing customer service often aren’t.
- But most importantly: you’re probably missing the real opportunity to solve their problem. The users above who asked for email alerts didn’t actually need email alerts - they needed to make sure their bills were paid on-time. Receiving an email, they figured, would remind them. When they made their request, they probably weren’t thinking of their already-overflowing inboxes.
Eight years ago, I owned a Rio mp3 player. It held about an hour’s worth of music, and if you’d asked me what I would improve about it, I would’ve said it “hold more music.” Other people like me probably did suggest that, because Rio made more expensive mp3 players with 2-4x more room for songs.
I wanted mine to have more space because I was tired of listening to the same songs over and over at the gym. I didn’t change the music very often because the process of loading different songs onto it took long enough that I kept putting it off. With more storage space, I wouldn’t have to go through the loading process as often. The real problem was that listening to music took a lot of work.
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