It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.
What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is.
In fact, we actually listen to fans all the time. It's helpful because you want to get a sense of what people are looking for and what they disagree with.
We have to design a health delivery system by actually talking to people and asking, 'What would make this service better for you?' As soon as you start asking, you get a flood of answers.
Who decides what's in Windows? The customers who buy it.
Here's the thing about Apple, we complain and they give us more battery life. We complain and they'll give us more stuff. Everything's beta right now. Everything's experimental. They really don't know what people want.
In design it is important to shoe the effect of an action. ... Feedback is critical.
A building is hard to judge. It takes many years to find out whether it works. It's not as simple as asking the people in the office whether they like it.
A design isn't finished until someone is using it.
Ultimately progress is measured sort of through the eyes of users.
Every person with a phone is a critic.
With 100 million people, somebody is using your product in some interesting way. If you change it... you're going to break some use cases.
You have to measure your success by the way your audience responds to your games. No matter how small that audience is, it's yours. Your game is part of the lives and the memories of those people in a way that WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3 or Windows can never be.
Listen to your customers, but don't always build exactly what they're telling you. This is a really key distinction around building enterprise software.
There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.
You should always look for opportunities to test innovations on a subset of users if you can.
Most of the fans have ideas about their perfect phone. But many of them can't do it because building a phone is tough. So they would give us feedback about the features that they think should be included in our next model. And if we incorporated that in our new phone, they will share the good news with their friends.
I've spent 10 years checking my analytics on my end to see what people were talking about and what they like.
A huge potential audience, great interaction with your readers, the ability to see what people like and what they don't, the ability to see how people respond to what you're doing in real-time - there's just tons of great stuff that you get by being online.
Don't worry, be crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test... Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap - but it was a revolutionary piece of crap.
We sent our user research team out to sit with customers for periods of time and get some insight into how Slack is working. We also get tens of thousands of points of contact via Twitter and our customer support ticketing system every month and can synthesize those results.
If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.
Moveon is not a one-way broadcast media. The Internet, when used best, is a two-way media. We have a forum in which people can post comments and those comments can be rated. We get a sense of what people feel most passionately about.
Time makes a bigger difference: just making a game, shipping it, looking at what you did, how you did it, what you did well, what you didn't do well, and doing better.
In the early days, it was enough for Imgur to have a team that was focused on building product and engineering. But I realized early on if we were going to be successful, we needed someone who would be a bridge between the company and community.
