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Comment by telesilla | Hacker News Reader

We apply this kind of thinking at work: early on we focused all our energy fixing user problems or adding features that were requested. We realised it is actually a small number of users who volunteer to report to us what's wrong or missing (outside of regular crash/feature tracking) - they are the ones that care enough to make an effort, and it's a small percentage. So we started campaigning to engage users we never heard from, to understand what problems they had that we weren't solving, to get them energised enough to report to us. It's been very successful, engagement has gone up significantly.

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Way back in the day I was a lone IT guy in a distributor/wholesaler, and part of that was creating line of business apps to do some real heavy lifting, extending existing ones, and creating utilities to tie other apps together. In a tiny company of maybe 40 people, where even an underpaid IT guy was still an extravagance (but was adding huge value).

Periodically I'd ask to shadow someone for a day or two. At some points, even asking if I could do their task and have them watch me to confirm I was doing it correctly.

What you would learn from this was amazing. All sorts of inefficiencies that people would quietly accept, because it was still way better than the previous state.

Then a week or two later I'd roll out the update, and get huge thank yous from accounting, or sales, or the warehouse because I completely trivialized some previous common task. What used to take 45 seconds now takes 2 because all the work is done for them 99.9% of the time and they just need to confirm it's correct (or correct the odd edge case). The computer became this increasingly magical tool they loved more and more.

The number of hacks and workarounds that users will come up with without complaining to the dev team is always astounding. One time I shadowed someone who was using one of our internal tools that spit out pdfs, and at some point along the line he realized he wanted something extra included on them but didn't think to contact the dev team. As part of his daily work flow, he was taking data from one of the program's temp files and editing the pdf to add it. He had apparently been doing this for about a year. When I saw this, I spent 10 minutes updating the report template to add it and ended up receiving thank you emails from people I'd never talked to.

So yes, find a user and shadow them.

This makes sense. The sort of users that leave any kind of feedback or even hang around long enough for you to gather statistics are those who think the product is pretty good, but there are just these small issues that they hope will get fixed. The users who think your product is complete crap try it, stop using it very early and never leave feedback or statistics for you to analyze.

Did those users actually report different issues altogether from the original ones, or did they just report more of the same kinds of issues?

Yes there is a large set of venn diagrams we weren't connecting that it gives us pretty easy access to greater coverage. The harder part becomes messaging and marketing as we target more use cases.

What mechanisms did you use to get users providing feedback? Popups asking or something?

Good old email segmenting. It's become a real powerhouse for us. Figure out what groups of people you have, talk with a few to figure out what they want, build it and target those who match. We're not a startup however so this is more of a scale up strategy or if you already have access to a large number of users who trust you and want just send your emails to spam.

What are some tactics you use to get these customers amped up?

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