When to listen to users & when not to?
trjordan: There are two ways to ask your customers what they want: you can ask them, or you can produce a product, and see if they buy it. I'd unquestionably go with the second approach.Even Google does it the second way, but, like everything else, they do it at scale. Instead of having a single designer, they let all of their engineers design, put everything out there with a "Labs" and "beta" sticker on it, and see what sticks. It their early days, they didn't have the resources to do that, so what did they do? Larry and Sergi pushed forward with their idea for a search engine, even as they were told the search space was closed.People never know what they want in the future, but, in numbers, they are fantastic at responding to truly good ideas and products. That's the feedback you want, "Tell us what you think" boxes be damned.