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Comment by janpot | Hacker News Reader

> you can find out if customers are using your new useful feature or if they can't find it

How do you find out if your "useful" feature isn't as useful as you thought it was? Or is it really always "the user can't find it"?

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You could talk to your users... (i.e. UX research), observe them using your website or product and ask them non leading probing questions to see what the intent is behind the behaviors affecting your bottom line. Qualitative research methods are a rich source of insight that is typically underinvested and underutilized.

Analytics (quantitative data) can help you find areas of bottlenecks to explore further by doing qualitative user research and getting to the ‘why’ behind the people problems standing in the way of your metrics you are tracking (retention, adoption, etc.). This is called ‘triangulation’ using quant and qual research methods to understand your users more deeply than just looking at data can achieve.

Users hate being bothered and hate taking surveys. Qualitative research isn't scientific anyway.

Well this is just untrue in my experience. I run a SaaS business and my customers love it when you ask for their opinions and insight.

Where are you getting your information from?

This is a very important point, thanks for saying this. It’s amazing how many people think they can start an indie SaaS and think that all they have to do is build it, deploy it, and buy AdWords or whatever. Talking to your customers is more important than any of that, and it’s fun.

Perhaps you're only hearing back from the ones who love it?

Related, survey respondents are known to be weird.

UX research participants are usually compensated, and so it's usually done to drill down deeper into problems that analytics found and test possible explainations. I don't see what's unscientific about that.

> Qualitative research isn't scientific anyway

Science is not the only form of truth.

Could be that, it could be design, it could be how something is worded, it could be that what you want the client to see, isn’t being seen. Analytics helps to identify this problem. For instance I noticed recently a huge drop-off in visitors from Ipads, and a redesign apparently made some parts of the site dysfunctional for some ipad users, something we didn’t catch earlier.

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