Thursday, August 2, 2007

Why Technologists don't listen to people that actually try to use their products?

I had an interesting experience with a new social networking service deployed in the Bulgarian web space called Tutmanik. I had the pleasure to experience first hand how professionals from the web industry do not listen to their end customers and actually dismiss their opinion as if you are an ignorant lamer and they have a divine intervention in what they do and how they do it.

I started to use the service because a member of my family had invited me to go and check it out. Immediately there were several problems but that is ok after all I did not expect a commercial product quality. I contacted tutmanik and we had a brief skype call in which I tried to explain my self as a user not as a fellow professionals because I had the stunning idea that they would actually be open to listening.

Most of the time they have been open to listen to, were the ideas that they actually had.
At the end of the conversation I asked if they had any more questions thinking that they might actually want to use me and ask me a few usability questions. Much to my surprise they said they did not had any questions!

What was I suppose to think when instead of listening to what I had to say as an end user, they interrupted me all the time and tried to explain why they did this or did not do that.
Frankly all I wanted was to share my experience with them and let them sleep on it and decide how they want to improve their service but no . Most of the time their reactions were as if I should be learning their site instead of their site to be natural and easy to work and comprehand.

I never got to the point where I was going to say what I thing about their interface which basically looks like a tutmanik ( for English language speakers this is a traditional Bulgarian dish)

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home