Reliable Systems

If you are responsible for a product, you need to actively seek out negative feedback from the best friends of your product. Sure, these folks probably give you a lot of positive feedback, and while that shouldn’t be ignored, it isn’t likely to help you move forward. If you are in a corporate setting developing products for the company this is doubly important. Even the most maligned project or team has its sponsors and friends. Find them, and work with them long enough to make sure they understand you’re able to handle negative feedback and that you really want it. Act on that feedback, and make sure they know where you got it from to encourage more feedback.

If you aren’t getting useful feedback on your product for where you fall short, you should consider why. It isn’t because your product is perfect, it’s going to be because either:

• Lack of Opportunity: You aren’t providing any straightforward ways of getting feedback from the users to you. Users have many things competing for their time, so you need to lower barriers in the way of them providing you feedback when they experience it.
• Perceived Resistance: If the user believes their feedback won’t be received or even worse if they’ll be called out to argue and defend it, they won’t provided.

Lack of Opportunity

What are you really doing to make it easy to get feedback from users and prospects at the time they conceive it? You want to have the barrier in time and difficulty as low as feasible, but you also need to be sure you collect enough information that your feedback is worth it. If the barrier is too low and you don’t collect much you won’t be able to make sense out of it, and the user won’t seek out a more qualified way. However, it’s better to risk that than have the user experience a moment of frustration or insight and not know where to send that information to you.

• Integrate Feedback: Whatever the application is, make it possible to send you feedback from within it. Web application, client server, whatever. Preferably not via email, but directly to a web service or other clean, hidden means. When you integrate it, you can more easily capture where the user was and some other state information to make the most sense out of what they say.
• On Your Product Web Site: Make it really easy for people that are evaluating, window shopping, getting support for, or otherwise interacting with you over the web to get commentary to you.
• When Interacting with Prospects: One of the hardest, and most useful, things to do if you are part of the sales process is to find out why you didn’t get a customer. Find ways to ask the prospect in a sincere way why they didn’t go with your product. They may not be truthful in their response, and you should make no effort to reverse their decision, but you will set yourself apart from your competition if they get that you are sincere about understanding where you fell short.

Bottom line: The higher the barriers to providing you feedback, the less good feedback you’ll get. Make it high enough and you’ll only get irate feedback that isn’t actionable.

Perceived Resistance

There is a general pact you have to agree to when you ask for feedback: You’ll accept whatever you’re told and not argue with it. You can sometimes ask for clarification, but this has to be done with the greatest care to neither create a burden on the person you’re interviewing or the impression you’re arguing with their feedback. If you don’t preserve this pact, you won’t get subsequent feedback from this individual or even people they talk with.

When you’re tempted to argue with them, remember that whatever they wrote is true for them. If, for example, they say that something wasn’t documented but you can point to the prose, then consider why they felt it wasn’t documented: Was it unclear? Could they not find the documentation? Did the terminology change between what they saw and what was documented, making them think they weren’t connected? Whatever they wrote was true for them in that moment, so look for all the ways that it could be true.

A handy technique is to take the case that what they are saying is true, and then prove that it is true. You can do this verbally with your team: “Take the case that users believe we didn’t document this. How could they come to that conclusion?” The small language change of “Take the case” can shift people’s willingness to have a good discussion because it doesn’t violate their believe of what is true, it just asks them to momentarily suspend it.

Still No Results?

If you aren’t getting negative feedback, it isn’t because there’s no negative feedback to be had. If your product is in use at all, people will have opinions about how it could be better. If you aren’t hearing about it, then there has to be a reason they don’t believe they can give it to you.

If feedback isn’t viewed as anonymous (either because it appears traceable or because your company is small enough that the user thinks you’ll be able to figure them out) and you or your team have a reputation of defending your product, then you’ve created an emotional barrier for them to overcome. You need to go out of your way to break this down.