The request comes in through support: please add an export to spreadsheet button on the orders page. Three customers have asked. It is on the roadmap by Friday, somebody builds it, and a month later the same customers are still unhappy.
What went wrong is common and easy to miss. The feedback contained two things, and the team only heard one of them.
When users tell you something is wrong, they are usually very reliable. They feel the friction directly, every day, far more often than you do. If they say the orders page is painful, it is painful. Believe that part almost completely.
When they tell you how to fix it, they are describing the best solution they can imagine from where they sit. They cannot see your data model, your other users, or the features you considered and dropped. An export button is often shorthand for something else entirely. I need to reconcile this against our accounting system every month. I need to show my manager a weekly total. I cannot filter the list the way I need to. The spreadsheet is where they would go to do the real work.
So treat the proposed fix as a clue rather than a specification. Go back and ask one question. What would you do with the export once you had it? Then, ideally, watch somebody do it. Five minutes of watching a customer copy numbers into a spreadsheet and add them up by hand will show you a better answer than the one they asked for, and sometimes it is simpler.
This does not mean ignoring what users suggest. Sometimes they are exactly right, and the export button really is the answer. The point is to know which situation you are in before you build.
Close the loop afterwards, whatever you decide. Tell the people who asked what you learned and what you built. If you did not build their button, explain what you built instead and why. Users forgive a different solution far more easily than silence, and they will keep telling you where it hurts, which is the valuable part.
Monday: pick one open feature request and ask the person who raised it what they would do next once they had it.
– Asael Shinder
