Posts Tagged ‘ TechCrunch ’

Mar 25
Wednesday

Michael Arrington: “If You Listen To Your Users, You Get Vanilla”

Filed under Tips/Advice
Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Listening to a small fraction of users could be harmful

Love him, hate him, or spit on him, you have to admit that Michael Arrington knows a thing or two about startups. He recently took back to writing on TechCrunch to express his beliefs into what he thinks Facebook is doing wrong: listening to its users.

Facebook is huge, and unless they mess up really really bad, they’re going to keep growing at amazing speeds. Facebook constantly goes through changes, in order to improve usability and to keep things interesting for long-time users.

The thing is, every time Facebook changes something, people start making groups with names like “Say No to the New Design” and “We Hate Facebook’s New Design.” As with all things Web 2.0, those groups go viral and millions of people join them, most for the sake of joining something.

The question is: should Facebook listen to these people? My answer (and Arrington’s) is simple: “no way!”. Facebook has something like 160 million users, so if you have 1 million complaining about something that actually improves the service, then you should pay attention to them.

Listening religiously to your users only leads to, as Michael Arrington says, vanilla. Users always want what they don’t have. Robert Scoble made a great point once, stating that “if Porsche listens to its users, and takes the suggestions to heart, you’ll end up with a Volvo.” And he’s right.

In order to push innovation, you have to move forward. Sure, you’ll lose some people on the way, but you have to deal with that. If at every point you turn back and ask your users if they like the new changes, you’re going to find that moving forward will get difficult by the second.

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