Understanding User Feedback Without Blindly Following User Solutions

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what is up it's uh Wednesday morning just leaving CrossFit like 7:00 a.m. um these windows are all fogged up just want to talk about a couple things before I get driving um first of all Monday was really crappy I lost three Vlog videos um the first one my camera died even though it was charging all weekend so it's a pain in the butt um it's like 13 minutes in and it just died I I don't understand so I said okay for the other two videos I'll film I'll plug in my my camera and my audio receiver and apparently when the audio receiver is plugged in uh it's not like isolated so you can hear very digital sounds uh the entire videos so I had to scrap all three of them for Monday which is really unfortunate um so I'm going to be trying to repeat

that content which is funny because this first one I've already done twice now I had to throw out just some chatting um the other thing I wanted to talk about is uh there was uh some criticism for filming in the car um basically I just wanted to say like I fully acknowledge people's per uh you know perspectives about trying to be safe while driving and not being distracted um absolutely behind that I wanted to kind of explain to you where the mirrors and stuff are in the car and the camera relative it's kind of hard cuz I can't show you um without like taking pictures and trying to print them out and hold them um uh the camera is not blocking any mirror that I have so my side mirror the rear view and the other mirror so right now I'm looking at the other

mirror so if it looks like I'm looking at the camera that's actually my side mirr this is the camera that's the side mirror um I do not have the screen folded out on the camera so I cannot see myself okay so um I wanted to acknowledge this because while I uh very much appreciate that people do not want distracted driving I also wanted to say my claim is that this is the exact same as me talking to someone in the car except they're not talking back to me so I would argue it's actually less distracting than having a conversation with someone in the car so um the thing that I don't appreciate is that if people are accusing me of uh of basically being negligent and being distracted because that's absolutely not the case and I'm not okay with that so uh just wanted to

acknowledge yes um I very much appreciate people trying to make sure that others are safe so this is not negligent and sorry I'm out of breath from Crossfit um I guess I I was doing this on the drive back so on Monday trying to make a point and I said I won't I won't even I won't even treat the camera as if it was a person next to me so right now I'm parked and I keep looking over at the camera when I'm driving I'm just going to be looking forward so if you see me looking this way it's because there's something I'm looking at in the mirror and that way um if you want to argue that I'm distracted while driving then I would say that any human being who has a passenger in their car while driving is distracted so that's the statement

I want to make and uh like I said I I appreciate that people are looking out forther safety so that said let me back out of this crappy spot the reason it's crappy is cuz the angle of the parking and there's a light but um there's also a hill at the light so as you're backing out it's like as soon as you see lights it's kind of like lights coming through the set of Lights it's hard to uh kind of adjust like you either fully commit or you pull back into the spot but fortunately it's not that busy okay the um topic I wanted to get through for the third time hopefully in Final time for now is uh I'm already like it's funny cuz I'm losing the context cuz it was from over the weekend but I wanted to talk about uh sort of

like in software engineering like building features for for customers right and trying to understand customers and the specifically what I wanted to discuss is like when you have customers that are uh solutioning and I wanted to explain what I mean by this and uh the reason I think it's important is because I don't think for a lot of software engineers in their in their entire careers I don't think they get an opportunity to work with uh like people that are you would consider customers of features by the way I'm stopped at a light um so when you don't have the opportunity to be interacting with customers and you're always working with a product owner like a user proxy um they end up doing a of this for you which is good like that's it's they get to lean into this as one of their skill

sets but the side effect of that sometimes is like then you don't get exposed to building out this particular set of skills maybe right some some software engineers get a lot of exposure to this so when I talk about solutioning this can happen especially with like subject matter experts or like expert users because they have a strong opinion about what they want and with that comes like they're envisioning what it looks and feels like okay so you can run into this situation where someone will say like hey um you know using the product and I want a feature where we can you know we can press this button and then there's a fly out panel and then in that panel I can see things that are organized this way and then I can press another button that does this other thing and to me I

know sorry that's a very vague example but um to me that's an example of like solutioning something they've just told you how to go Implement something that they want and it's not necessarily that like you automatically have to rule that out and say well absolutely cannot consider that the thing that you don't necessarily want to do is always blindly just do exactly what they say and I I'm choosing those words kind of carefully because it's not I'm not suggesting to ignore customers like this is the the important distinction you're not ignoring customers but when you have customers that give you this solution if you kind of extrapolate this and kind of let's it's a little bit exaggerated but let's say you do this for One customer and you build exactly what they say okay and then next customer that does this you build exactly what

they say and then you have a you know over time you have a bunch of customers that you keep doing this for what ends up happening is if you're only blindly just implementing the solutions they're telling you to you end up with like a pretty disjoint product or offering and that's because you are you're basically letting customers do the software engineering for you or I I guess one might argue like the product engineering right they're they've told you exactly what to go build but if you just blindly follow it without questioning it now you don't understand necessarily why you're building it you don't necessarily understand what problems you're trying to solve the reason it becomes disjoint is if you think about it you have people on the outside of your team with their lens on the product the vision that you have for the product

or the service again they're on the outside of the development team and then they're telling you the solution so the way that you can improve upon this again and I'm not I want to be careful I I did a I think I did a much better job when I talked about this the first time through in the video that I had to throw out but like the um the thing I'm trying to not say here is like that customers that are doing this are bad it's not the customers that are doing this or bad in fact it's awesome that they're they're that passionate about it that they're like they can see what they want they have like an idea like they're excited they're trying to help like these are all great things so I'm not trying to say hey if you have a customer like

this like they suck or anything like that it's it's quite the opposite it's amazing to have customers like this but you just need to be like you need to have some awareness so so the way in my opinion that you work around this is that instead of just like blindly rushing to go Implement whatever they're saying is to ask them why and what problem they're solving right so and it might be obvious it might seem obvious when they're describing it to you but I think it's worth trying to get them to say it and that way it's expit like if you know what problem they're trying to solve or what pain point they're having then as a software engineering team you can come up with the solution it might be that the solution that they're offering is a great solution so I'm not that's why

I was saying it's not a matter of like outright dismissing them it's not the case it's not like a customer must be a dummy like we can't believe anything they say like don't listen to them no it's just that you also need to put in the effort to come up with Solutions so again instead of customer saying hey like I want this feature and like make it do this this this like great okay acknowledge it but then say well you know what what problem are you trying to solve right why is it you want this feature what's that going to what's that going to help you with like where are you getting stuck right now where is the friction what is this going to let you do and just understand the motivation behind it and once you understand why and what problem they're trying to

solve then you can jump into trying to come up with ideas for Solutions so I wanted to walk through an example that came up on the weekend was actually two two individual feature requests from a user for brand ghost and nothing wrong with these requests I think that they're totally uh reasonable uh I see like after talking through them I see the value um so again this is not me saying hey look at our look at our bad customer exact opposite I think it's great they offered feedback um I think it's great that they could Envision a solution but I wanted to walk through why there were some challenges with this so the um the first one was around uh searching my goodness um so for if you're not familiar with our product offering it's uh a service called brand ghost and it's for posting

content to social media and we organize content into what is called a topic stream and the topic stream is sort of this grouping of content that you want posted on a particular Cadence and to certain social media platforms and this individual said I would like to be able to search my topic streams okay so makes sense right now he offered a little bit more of an explanation in terms of what he wants like when I'm at this screen I want to be able to search I should be able to type in here and press search and and see the topic streams I said okay now if I stop there if I stopped there what I would have built was keyword searching and when we think about what you could be keyword searching in a topic stream the topic stream has a name and it has

a description so in my head I'm like I don't I see what he's asking like he wants to be able to keyword search like technically very achievable but I don't really understand why and the reason I don't really understand why is because for a given user you don't have that many topic streams usually like you have disproportionately more content than topic streams so I'm thinking like you could probably see all of your topic streams on one page in a browser so like I get that we could build keyword searching but I don't I don't understand why so I started asking more and I said well what feel fields on the topic stream do you want to search like just the name the description like kind of like what what what are we trying to solve here cuz if I know say it was like by

you're trying to search the names I'm like oh are we not displaying them in like an obvious way like I can try to figure out like other ways to go enhance this maybe it's keyword searching and something else I don't know but as we started talking I realized like yeah it's they're not actually asking for this feature and it's because that probably wouldn't be that helpful what they're asking for is they want to keyword search the the content as it relates to topic streams which is interesting because the way they started explaining it was like I wanted I wanted keyword search I wanted to find the content and then I want it broken out by topic stream again that that's a solution they've told me how to physically lay out the content for them to look at but if we think about it now I

know what problem they're trying to solve and it's that they have a lot of content and they want to be able to figure out how they can go find particular posts okay so a couple things come to mind one is that's not hard for us to do it's good news number two what they're describing is they're looking for Content they have but they're also proposing a keyword search which I think is a pretty traditional thing right like that would be the sort of basic kind of approach and I don't think there's anything wrong with it but like especially because we're building AI into our tool this concept of like semantic search could be incredibly valuable in this case because if we take for example if we do the keyword searching part and someone like I want to search for all the posts that say c

like when you start to have a lot of content if you're looking for a particular post do you need to have like the exact keywords to go find it or like what if I just wanted to know all of the posts that were about C or all of the posts that were about impostor syndrome and if I could use semantic search maybe that would be more effective at basically just identifying posts about a given topic so I mean in my head I'm going maybe that's actually something we want later like that's going to be more work for us to do right this moment but maybe we want that so now I have some ideas right okay they they want to be able to find their content easier because the only way that you can get to it right now is by going to a topic

stream and then scrolling through all of the content for that topic Stream So once they have a lot it starts to be hard to navigate makes sense okay like but you see what I'm what I'm doing here is like I'm I'm trying to understand what problem they're facing and if I wouldn't have been questioning these things I could have just gotone and built something that searched the topic streams and even if we had the conversation and I said okay you want to search content let me search the content I'll keyword search it and I'll display it exactly the way you want so here's something else to think about though the the organization of that output of the of the search results that's only one view of it right like we could technically display that any which way we could group it by topic stream we

could group it by social media platforms that will get posted to we could group it by uh the date we could um show it as a list we could show it as tile views like you could do any of those you could do all of those and let you let the user switch between them so like if you're not careful like again if you just followed the advice blindly you might say well man we don't even have a view like that we don't have a view that shows the topic streams Broken Out by their content and stuff so like okay now we got to go invest all this time to go build that specifically and it's like well do we actually need that it sounds like for this user that's how they would like it so like yes we appreci appreciate that feedback that's good

to know but like could we just go build this feature and uh sort the content by the created date and then when you're looking at the content you can see what topic stream it's for maybe that's good enough to start so I think it's important to be able to to start understanding why before you're going to build things um there's a I'll talk about this other topic after work today so the the next Vlog that comes up but it builds on this um because it was a bit of a funny story from the weekend uh funny for you not funny for me and uh everything's fine but um just like running into like funny stuff with uh trying to do something that seems like it was simple and it turned out to not be so simple uh but I think there's some good carryover for

like General software engineering ideas um sorry my mouth is getting pretty dry so this has been helpful because we've been getting we have been getting really good feedback like this where um we're kind of like when people give you descriptive feedback like that and they're saying like this is the solution I want it almost makes it like you can sit in their seat and and try to imagine what they're doing but getting the explicit understanding about why and what problem I think is helpful um there's another good the same user had a good request and uh this like this is a good reason like good thing that we have a team to kind of talk through it so the example in this case was about um being able to order content that gets added and when we I kind of forwarded the feedback to the

team because I had been talking with the individual but um when this individual was talking about what they wanted again I I want to be careful when I say this because my intention is not to make it sound like I'm criticizing the individual I want to be very clear about that um because I am extremely thankful for the feedback and like it would be impossible for us to build good software without the feedback so I'm just framing this up for you so that again if you're someone that does not work actively with users and getting feedback to try and build things uh it just something for you to kind of visualize and kind of walk through with me but this user had reached out and they basically wrote a couple of paragraphs about um what they want to see happen and what they were asking

for was the ability to basically drag and drop um in their content but the examples that they were providing were about uh like the other social media platforms like hey on on I can't remember was Facebook or LinkedIn I don't have the messages in front of me but um like hey when you upload pictures you can reorder the pictures and you can do that by dragging and dropping so I'm I'm getting these messages going okay yeah like that that makes sense for sure and like yeah I agree those user interfaces are intuitive but in my head I'm going like but we don't even yet support at least not in the front end we don't support like uh multi-p picture posts so for example if you wanted to post to Instagram and do uh the equivalent of a carousel the front end does not let you

configure that the back end does the front end does not uh LinkedIn supports documents right now because that's how LinkedIn does carousels but I was thinking like like these are you know it's a good description of what you would want for that but I'm like we don't even support it so I started to get very curious about like why is this why is this person jumping right to all of these solutions for reordering media what when we don't even we don't offer that right so I'm getting very curious I'm like I must I must be missing something that's my first uh my first go-to because I know like the individual is intelligent uh they understand things like it's not it's not like oh this user dumb or something um so I'm going okay like what am I missing about this because you know they're they're

going into detail about how they expect this sort of drag and drop user interface to look and then I asked a little bit and realized that they're not they're not asking me to do uh multiple picture multiple video posts which is again if I would have just blindly looked at the initial feedback and jumped into it I would have went back to the team and said we got to get the the carousel style post working we got to get Instagram working with multiple pictures and videos like we got to get that done and then this user would not have cared at least not in this uh this context so from poking and prodding a little bit more it turns out that they just want to be able to reorder their content okay so and there's a reason for this but it might not be obvious

so uh and it's not obvious even to uh some people on the team so this is like this is why it's good to talk through this kind of stuff um so this person saying no no it's not that I want want to do this with actual pictures I want this kind of thing in the interface for my content I want to make sure that I can take this content that I added and move it to a different position now it's a bit of a weird idea because the way that our system works is that we post things on a Cadence right so there's a schedule that goes out and whatever is sort of next to be posted will go out and then it will recycle when once it hits the end of everything so what does it matter like you know if you get enough

content do you really care about the order and the answer is yes you still do so because the way it will default to posting if it has never posted something before so say you add a 100 pieces of content and it's never posted any of them it will post the first one that you created like the oldest one so what happens is that if you go add a bunch of content you're onboarding your content and the created date for that content is kind of in a spot that's maybe clustered to closely together or or whatever else you may want to like artificially say like no don't keep it there move it to a different spot change the order so that when this this goes out I don't have like 50 posts in a row that are all on this topic like I want to spread

them out I wanted to create them that way but I don't want to post them that way so I go ah okay so the thing that you're trying to solve is that you want to make sure that you don't have too much content together or that you do want to group content together but you can't unless you create it in that order it's coupled together so excellent okay now I have this understanding now how we Implement that do we need drag and drop do we need something else does it have to look exactly like whatever we have to figure that out as an engineering team but now I can go cool at least I understand why this person would want this um this user interface to do it which makes a lot more sense now when I brought it back to the team this is

again like an opportunity to discuss things because I said hey like they uh they want to be able to reorder and um one of the the team memb said well we already have like sorting so like you know like can can they get what they need just by sorting the content like it should already be there unless something broke in the user interface but that's a different problem right it's not about just finding the content it's not about finding the earliest content soon it's about moving and changing it so again this opportunity when you start discussing things and having different perspectives um like people interpret things different ways so being able to go no it's not not just a matter of finding it it's about uh truly being able to modify the order it would be like the difference between is this sorted versus I

want to change the sort order of this of this content so again you know going through this kind of stuff it's not always obvious and it can be really helpful to have other people share their perspective but whole point of this talk was just that when you're getting feedback and requests like taking the time to understand these things is critical um because I don't want to say it can just be easy to go Implement solutions that might still be challenging but it can be a bit of a trap if you're not understanding why so that's what I wanted to talk about today um I realized I wasn't driving to the office so when I said earlier I'll talk about this other video on my my dry back I could probably talk about that next and maybe there's a juicy topic for the drive home so

we will see but for now I'm going to go nap with the kitties for a little bit I think that'll be good rest a little bit before work and then I'll get driving in because today is big project kickoff day which will be exciting so I will see you folks later thanks for tuning in and uh I appreciate hanging out for the drive see you next time