August 31st, 2008
When is it time to listen to you customers?
One of the biggest problems facing those who develop the User Experience is when you should listen to your customers and when you should innovate. Henry Ford famously said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” This statement has been a banner for many in the User Experience realm for why you don’t have to talk to customers to make great products.
But there are other times when you should really sit down and listen to what your customers are telling you. Recently someone decided to take the time to create an entire website dedicated to identifying problems with a product they USE. Dear Adobe collects peoples grips about any and all adobe products then lets other people vote for how important the problems is to them.
After skimming through the top 50 items you can see that Adobe’s Update process for Acrobat is a sore spot for a lot of people. If Adobe is smart they would try and react swiftly to this by LISTENING to what the users are saying and resoliving their problems. Sure not everything in the list can be corrected(pricing) but a lot of the ideas are common sense items that Adobe has lost site of.