Comment by jubilanti
7 hours ago
Wow, it really is sad how literally unthinkable it is to you and so much of the industry that you could actually talk to your users and customers like human beings instead of just data points.
And you know what happens when you reach out to talk to your customers like human beings instead of spying on them like animals? They like you more and they raise issues that your telemetry would never even think to measure.
It's called user research and client relationship management.
I think you’re overlooking that they were talking about stated and revealed preferences, a well known economic challenge where what people say is important to them and what shows up in the data is a gap. Of course you talk to users and do relationship management. That doesn’t negate the need to understand revealed preferences.
In the OSS world this is not a huge deal. You get some community that’s underserved by the product (ie software package) and they fork, modify, or build something else. If it turned out to be valuable, then you get the old solution complemented or replaced. In the business world this is an existential threat to the business - you want to make sure your users aren’t better served by a competitor who’s focusing on your blindspot.
Customer interviews are an indispensable, high-value activity for all businesses. They are a permanent, ongoing capability that the organization must have. A conversation will surface things that analytics will not catch. People will describe their experiences in a qualitative manner that can inspire product improvements that analytics never will.
However, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data". People are unreliable narrators, and you can only ask them so many questions in a limited time amid their busy lives. Also, there are trends which appear sooner in automated analytics by days, weeks, or even months than they would appear in data gathered by the most ambitious interview schedule.
There is a third, middle-ground option as well: surveys. They don't require as much time commitment from the user or the company as a sit-down interview. A larger number of people are willing to engage with them than are willing to schedule a call.
In my experience, all three are indispensable tools.
You are inferring your own perception based on my comment, no need to be an asshole here. Like I said elsewhere we do both and they serve different purpose. We also make is very clear and easy to disable in the onboarding. I hope you try to build a business sometimes and open up your perspectives that maybe just maybe you don't have all the answers.
You stated that you are blind without analytics, which heavily implies other forms of user research are useless and don’t provide meaningful signal. I don’t think an assumption that you’re not using other methods is that outrageous.
> We also make is very clear and easy to disable in the onboarding.
Yeah, sure. How long is that policy gonna last? How does a user even know that that checkbox does anything?
Once you’ve decided to break a social contract it’s not like you can slap a bandaid on it and it’s all okay now.
> I hope you try to build a business sometimes and open up your perspectives that maybe just maybe you don't have all the answers.
People were building successful businesses long before the Internet.
> You are inferring your own perception based on my comment, no need to be an asshole here.
People in this case are likely extrapolating based on how user data is harvested in the industry at large. So there is bound to be (very likely) some characterization that is unfair to you.
Given modern data aggregation, really data vacuuming, and that software is opaque, it can be really hard to trust anyone with any aggregation of data. They say that they pseudonymize properly. The proof? Trust them bro. Then read yet another news article about how some data aggregation was either sloppily leaked or just a front for selling data.
A natural response to opaque practices by people you don’t trust is a hardline no.
The problem they're trying to solve is to find out what functions of their software are most useful for people and what to invest in, and to make directions on product direction.
Yes, vendors can, do, and should talk to users, but then a lot of users don't like receiving cold messages from vendors (and some users go so far as to say that cold messages should _never_ be sent).
So, the alternative is to collect some soft telemetry to get usage metrics. As long as a company is upfront about it and provides an opt-out mechanism, I don't see a problem with it. Software projects (and the businesses around them) die if they don't make the right decisions.
As an open source author and maintainer, I very rarely hear from my users unless I put in the legwork to reach out to them so I completely identify with this.
If you have an existing financial relationship with someone it is by definition not a "cold message." People who think they should never, ever be contacted by a company they are paying to use a service of are in the extreme minority. That's "cabin in the woods with no electricity" territory.
Marketing came to the conclusion that people dont know what they actually want. They decided to lump in engineers and programmers as well, since they started abusing their goodwill.
Apple and Microsoft reached their peak usability when they employed teams of people to literally sit and watch what users did in real life (and listen to them narrating what they want to do), take notes, and ask followup questions.
Everything went to crap in the metric-based era that followed.
Get off your high horse.
Talking to users when you have hundreds of customers does no more than give you an idea of what those specific people need. If you have hundreds of users or more, then data is the only thing that reliably tells you these things.