Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Matt Hulett
There has been a tremendous amount of uproar about the new Facebook re-design. Facebook mentioned in a recent blog post that they are listening to consumers and will be tweaking the design based on their feedback.
Digerati luminaries like Michael Arrington posted recently that he thinks that it’s a mistake to listen to the consumer backlash. He is encouraging Facebook to stay the course and not listen to them. In his words, if you let consumers influence your product then “….when you listen to your users, you get vanilla. feature creep. boring. It takes a dictator to create the iPhone and change the course of an entire industry.”
I remember spending an inordinate amount of time back in the packaged software era sitting behind two-way mirrors listening to customers’ feedback. Or alternatively performing endless amounts of time culling through user experience research feedback. I tend to agree with the Arrington’s and Scoble’s of the world that in today’s fast-paced online development cycles, you shouldn’t listen to consumers feedback. I would much rather deploy technology first and watch the overall results than to constantly iterate over a sea of consumer feedback. You may end up not listening to the feedback and rather elect that your product decision is the best decision for your corporate goals.
I would rather build something that is really good than constantly delay a release and try to make it absolutely perfect because you’ll never make everybody happy.
