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Comment by jaredandrews | Hacker News Reader

Interesting comment on the bottom of the article:

  This random user is a prick.

  1. Why didn’t he scroll to the bottom of the page? I noticed an “about us” link in the footer.

  2. When I’m curious about companies, I look at their blogs. Sometimes they use a blog CMS system. Why didn’t this guy check the links in the header, like the link to your blog?

  3. This guy has a baby babbling in the background. Maybe he was distracted?

We do a lot of user testing at work and it has really opened my eyes. This sort of attitude really bums me out though. You can sit around all day and complain about customer incompetence. Meanwhile they are out using a different app/product and you still aren't making any money/conversions.

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FWIW, I thought for a while about whether or not to approve that comment due to it's flamewar-factor, but I approved it so I could write this response:

"Ehhh I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a “prick”. Yeah he certainly could have gone through our blog and read up on Ramen. He could have clicked on our project page and watched our video. I think the point of Peek, though, is that you can’t tell a visitor that their first impression (and/or their first confusion) is _wrong_. I think he brings up a lot of completely valid points about our homepage. We haven’t put enough energy into making our homepage something that succinctly describes what we do. He called us out on it. I give him kudos."

Those projects appear to be your clients. Clicking on a project video is absolutely the wrong answer.

Why isn't "Fundraising Platform" in the left column clickable? That should lead to expository text, but it isn't even a link.

As a founder I loved to get feedback like this. Was I proud of some feature or design that I'd worked hard on? That's nice, but if it's not working for customers, it's not working. Swallow pride, move on.

Although that's a healthy attitude, it gets tricky when the company grows and the customer is criticizing work done by your employees. Your instinct is still that the customer is automatically right, and that's still true, but you have to be less blunt with employees than you'd be with yourself. You need to acknowledge their work was good, we just need to try something different. Regardless, they need to hear and act on it. And there is no way you call a customer a "prick", for offering polite feedback like in that video. You thank them.

Sometimes I'd remind folks that it wasn't me, it was our customers who were paying for our salaries, the office around us, the chairs we're sitting on. Ultimately the customers are the boss, not me.

Edit: If you have investors, now you have two bosses.

It's pretty clear that that commenter doesn't have any serious experience with user testing. A design needs to work with the user - you don't abuse the user because they don't efficiently use your design. Well, not if you're professional.

Yeah, if a user is completely lost to the point of giving up on your site despite having a genuine interest in it, acting like he's wrong or stupid is completely missing the point. The Ramen.is folks seem to have done a good job of taking the feedback to heart rather than getting defensive.

Look at it this way: if you're trying to get a user to use your site, what difference does it make whether the problem is due to bad design on your part or him supposedly being a bit dense? Your goal is to get him to use the site, so you take the usability failure and figure out how to make it harder for him to fail.

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