Ask HN: What do you do to receive honest feedback for your products?

I am an owner of grocery shop and for me it is super easy to have a talk with my clients or to observe their behaviour. Somebody don't like our goods or service, somebody use to fall down before even entering because tiles on stairs become slippery on winters. Somebody use to steal something as expensive as possible without any real needness. Well, software business is different but find a way to get some talks with your clients and try to find a way to observe what they are actually doing (please look at people but not spyware trackers).

Definitely lots of feedback from everyone possible. Try and have someone other than you ask in some cases, because people will be deferential and kind to you as inventor/creator.

Sometimes you can get small grants to cover professional advice, which can include feedback, or sometimes there will be events where you can get such advice from experts for free.

I also help run an invetors' club, and that is another good venue for advice.

Be curious.

Never get defensive.

Have you read The Mom Test? Highly recommended.

Here's a summary: https://www.slideshare.net/xamde/summary-of-the-mom-test

The closer you are to the target user and target buyer (not necessarily the same person), the better. You can learn a lot from anyone, but it might be at a pretty abstract level and less useful.

Focus as much as you can on users and buyers. Speak with them often, observe what they do often, wherever they are - conversations with you, chatting with each other online, complaining about current pain points with existing solutions, including in reviews for products that solve similar problems.

Good luck!

>Especially when you're just starting out, and have no users yet.

Add analytics, even rudimentary. Something like PostHog is good.

Add monitoring (Sentry) so you catch exceptions in your code when soon to be people and systems use your product without them having to report them. You'll fix problems faster and prioritize (most frequent, most impactful, etc).

Create a Slack workspace where your users could ask questions.

Get users.

Observe behavior and usage. Keep an eye on non-consumption. Schedule calls with them and ask about what they're trying to accomplish with your product.

If they're not using a feature you know they need or have stopped using it (from analytics), ask why they're not using it or not using it anymore (the load time is just too long, it's buggy, it doesn't support their use case, they moved on to something else or to another role).

Look at where people are coming from (referrers in analytics) but also ask them where they're coming from (community? subreddit? HN? Word of mouth? Someone mentioned it? Who? Ask them. Rinse and repeat. Investigate everything.)

Look at email addresses and their domains. Are they university accounts? Are there many from the same organization? Investigate. Ask questions on how they signed up and what they're trying to do.

You want to get users. You'll get all the feedback you need, either active or passive (them not using something, not doing something, dropping something mid-action).

Ask questions. Don't really ask for "feedback" because you're putting them on the spot. Ask "Have you tried x?". If you're aware of an issue in something, let it out, they may laugh and be relieved because they didn't want to break it to you, but you did and now they can go on about why something sucks for them because they now know you won't be butthurt if they say something.

Ask questions to know the problem they are trying to solve and you'll get reasons or usage or non-usage (work in a very sensitive organization and they can't, regulations, formats, etc).

Asking for "feedback" in the form it is most known is like asking someone what they think of you. Mostly useless and uncomfortable. You want people to be comfortable sharing with you, and they're most comfortable talking about the problems they're having.

This book was really important for me early in my career, and I still recommend it to others quite regularly https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9039673-undercover-user-... it will give you plenty of tactics you can use to conduct user research and gather feedback when you have no users or low budget etc.

Not having users is a strong feedback on your product.

Finding users is a the priority.

It is hard painful work.

Good luck.

I tell people that I'm not precious about my stuff, and if something sucks I want them to tell me so that I can make it better.

The other thing that I find works really well is "what is your least favorite thing about this tool?"

A survey honestly helps a lot. Also Hotjar has a tool thar records users using a site. You can see people's frustrations on it.

Most people should avoid friends and family. Or rather "normies" who aren't your target market. You'll get dishonest replies by people who want to support you, people who are blindly envious, people who want to sound clever or helpful. You'll often get feedback like "this costs too much" or "this is too ugly", when your actual target market is happy for it.

Try to actually sell them something, that's the best way to get genuine feedback :P Until money is involved (or the hassle of account creation, I guess) it's all play to them.

Perhaps more useful answer is to be part of a practitioner community, as you noted.

I’ve noticed that asking leading _negative_ questions opens up people a lot.

Me: “The lights are too bright, right?” (Hardware product)

User: “No they are fine but I wish the display was larger.”

I think questioning like this makes user comfortable criticising you.

There are a handful of web forums where people discuss the hobby that my product is related to. They're pretty frank. In addition to reading comments about my product, I also read both the praise and horror stories about other vendors, and try to form a picture in my mind of what really went wrong with the bad customer experiences.

Show pop-up windows when launching app/opening website at least 3 times a day. Guaranteed honest feedback!

Presumably if you are building something for a domain, you know some people who are working in that domain. Don't ask those friends, ask them to recommend their least tactful colleague, the one who knows everything about everything, and can't keep their opinions to themself.

I have an exit survey on my Chrome extension, which loads automatically upon uninstall. People who hate the extension, or hate aspects about it, are more than happy to provide such feedback. Sometimes with obscenities.

One thing that people complained about was price, so I decided to ask people what price they thought was fair, from a list of three options (50% off, 75% off, and 99¢/yr). I then offered them a coupon code at whatever price they indicated was fair.

After offering this for years, and with over a thousand people going through this branch of the survey (which required saying that cost was the primary reason for uninstall), only a handful took me up on the discount. My takeaway from this is that lots of people will say that something should be X% cheaper, but nearly all of those people would not buy it even if it were that price.

Having learned this lesson, I no longer offer the uninstall discount, or many discounts at all.

You ask people "Help me save time. I know why this will succeed, tell me why it will fail."

I hire UI/UX professionals on UpWork. That is the best solution I have come up with. It is totally worth it to pay somebody $70-$100 to review your site or app for an hour and give you actionable advice.

It shouldn't happen like this in the first place. Before building something, you should already have access to your target audience. There are many ways of solving this. E.g. doing consulting and building a list of clients with a similar problem. Starting out to build a solution without this makes it just so much more likely that you build something that doesn't solve a real problem or there's no buying interest. Ideally, you can build for a group of clients who are ready to pay when you give them an MVP.

If you have a product but no users at all, I think you should go back to the step of idea validation. Make sure what you're building is something that people might use in the first place.

Multiple ways to do this.

Th easiest, imo, is to set up a simple landing page for your idea. Know before-hand who might be interested in your product, if it's just a handful of people, that works too. Just prepare for a lot of manual work (getting in touch with people and conversing about your product in different ways without making it seem like some sort of an ad), at least until your first 1000 users, more so for the first 500 (assuming your end-users are individuals and not businesses).

Get like a hundred users and you will likely get a couple hero’s who take the time to tell you their problems and give you truly valuable feedback.

1) find the people who have the problem you’re solving / creating value for

2) have them use / experience the product and watch them

3) have them think out loud while their doing that and keenly observe how they use experience the product

4) the observations should point to low hanging fruit for improvement

5) ask open ended unbiased questions about the experience and listen to them talk about it. Example: what did you think?

6) you don’t necessarily need to use a big sample size to get good feedback. Getting feedback from 10 people, you will see six that show the same pattern and you will then know to focus on that

7) hypothesize on improvements from what you learn, build, release again a and repeat feedback with real users

8) you will know you have something great when people show they are impressed. Be careful if people just saying it’s great as everyone will do this, so you will only really know if it’s great through observing.

9) if you can’t do this and are a solo founder, you probably will have a very difficult time with sales once you find product market fit since you always have to be in front of people and pitching

Find Israeli friends or colleagues. They will tell you the brutal truth.

Any culture where people tend to be direct will do.

It's part of my job, so my advice would be:

1. You talk with real people, it's way more complex than doing a survey, but you'll get better data. 2. Talk to your customers or ask your potential customers if you don't have them.

3. Don't ask your friends, especially your mum - she'll tell you've got a great product because she loves you.

4. Important thing is to ask open-ended questions that don't suggest the answers. 5. You should see patterns after interviewing about 5-20 people. 6. Then, you use the answers and create a survey that will be statistically significant (about 384 respondents) - there're paid services that let you do that.

That's it.

What an amazing story, thanks for sharing.

I would ask an UX Researcher to help you out via platforms like Fiverr. This is literally their job.

Source : I am a UX Researcher :)