The Key To Personal & Product Success: Get Negative Feedback
The key to improvement whether its for personal development or making better products is: get negative feedback.
It stands to reason that you can’t improve what you don’t know you are bad at. The same goes for when you are making product decisions. You need your users or customers to tell you what they DON’T like.
“The research showed that experts — people who were masters at a trade — vastly preferred negative feedback to positive. It spurred the most improvement. That was because criticism is generally more actionable than compliments. “You did well” is less helpful in improving your bowling game than “You turned your wrist too much.”
Source: Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success
The challenge is how to go about eliciting this negative feedback from your users. Human nature usually dictates that you don’t go throwing around negative sentiment to one another as its deemed rude. However luckily for us we have the internet where all societal norms seem to get thrown out of the window ;-).
So step 1 is you need to be able to ask your users for negative feedback and then give them an easy way to proffer it.
There are a number of useful tools below which can help gather user feedback (in no particular order) :
The key though is to use these tools to specifically ask what your customers DON’T like and then ask if they have any ideas on how it could be improved.
This small tweak can make leaps and bounds in your overall product offering, trust me give it a go.
