How many times you got stuck in a meeting with designers, developers, project managers and sometimes people from the MGMT in the middle of a religious debate?
No I’m not referring to real Religion. I’m talking about something that usually goes like:
– “I think our users wants to get $this_product as soon as they get on our website”
– “No way! It’s clear that they want to see $other_product first!”
– “Most users don’t like $other_product because it’s too advanced”
etc.
Steve Krug has a very similar example in his book “Don’t Make me think” so I borrowed his definition of “Religious debate” for my example as well. Ask Krug says:
They consist largely of people expressing strongly held personal beliefs about things that can’t be proven-supposedly in the interest of agreeing on the best way to do something important.
But we are scientists, right? So let’s do something scientific: let’s ask our users what they want!
Here comes Qualaroo, a simple yet powerful survey tool. With a simple snippet of code on your pages you can ask any kind of question to your visitors.
The tool is very powerful and I’m going to get in details on how to use it in the future, by now just remember that asking is much better than guessing even if users tend to lie, forget and change (cit. Luca Mascaro).
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