What's Empathy Got to Do With It?

“Thanks Snapchat. Your app officially sucks.” @michaellorelei

“@McDonalds your app totally sucks! Never works! #TechFail#McFailure” @Duncan03Dawn

It’s easy to find tweets like this for just about any app.

But let’s say you’re part of the team working on the program in question. If you’re like many people, you might feel overwhelmed by the vague negativity of the feedback, unsure of how to address the user’s concerns. What was it about the app that was such a #McFailure?

One of the most crucial lessons for anyone designing a software program “for the people” is to learn how to address user feedback constructively — and to disentangle criticism of a product from your ego. User feedback always presents an opportunity to put yourself in others’ shoes, to to see your project through their eyes, and ultimately make it better through the experience.

In other words, it’s all about the empathy — and harnessing that empathy to drive progress. The question is: How do you shift your mindset and team culture from dismissing to embracing that hard-to-hear feedback? Here are six concrete ideas.

1. See the Silver Lining: No matter how strongly you identify with the software project in question, the comments aren’t about you as a person. Be mindful of your emotional reaction when you’re reading it. Try to find a balance between taking the feedback so seriously that it upsets you, and discounting it to the point that you lose motivation to understand what’s going on. Remember that these kinds of messages are a sign that people care about what you’re doing. They are trying to use your software. It excites them enough that they’re even trying to tell you when it disappoints them. They may not have the vocabulary, time, design understanding, or technical acumen to explain what they dislike, but they want you to hear them so you have a chance to make things better.
   
2. Give Them A Place to Kvetch and Kvell: Feedback channels don’t have to be elaborate or high-maintenance; while it’s great if your team can support online user forums localized in 23 languages, a simple email address that is prominently advertised on your website is an effective place to start. Pro tip: don’t just tell users to file a bug on GitHub. That’s a great way to get highly-technical users to submit feedback, but a lousy way to get insights from just about anyone else. In addition to your official feedback channel, don’t forget to monitor your project’s social-media accounts on a regular basis. Even if you don’t think of it as a way for users to send feedback, they almost certainly do. And there’s nothing more demoralizing to a user than landing on a Facebook page and finding that there are complaints that have been ignored for months (or years!) on end.
   
3. Muster The Troops: Making sense of user feedback is critically important to software projects, because your users’ opinions will ultimately determine the success of your software. (If they don’t like it, eventually they’ll find a better alternative; if they do like it, they’ll tell their friends and your userbase will grow.) Do you have one or more team members who are responsible for this work? Do those people actually have time to engage with the data that is coming in? Do they have time during team meetings to share their findings? Does the team use this information to help it prioritize near- and long-term work? Answering these questions is crucial.
   
4. Set a Baseline: “Do we really need to start gathering and analyzing user data now? Our userbase is so small! And people seem to like it!” If you have a software project that people outside the team are using, it’s past time to start gathering data on what those users are saying about it. An accurate picture today will provide the basis for future evaluation.
   
5. Build a Two-Way Street: Not all feedback is created equal: sometimes users provide feedback that isn’t exactly useful. After all, how can you debug a problem if you don’t even know what version of the software the user is running? To help ensure that the criticism you’re getting is useful, you can create a feedback system that makes them feel heard. That allows you to engage with them on a deeper level — asking them about the details of their issue. Set up an automated reply thanking them for the feedback, and create a page on the project website to describe what type of information makes a good bug report.
   
6. Build Your Dream Team: Invite your critics to a beta-testing group. Beta-testing can help you prevent huge waves of negative feedback by providing more eyes on software updates, and can serve as a great way to channel the enthusiasm of some of your biggest user critics. Some distribution platforms like Google Play have features to make this easier.
   

Reacting openly to feedback is essential, whether you’re writing code for an app or prose for a blog. It’s part of building empathy into your professional practice — which is something we could all use more of. I try to practice what I preach, and am eager to hear about how these ideas match — or mismatch! — your experiences.

A version of this post originally appeared on Simply Secure’s blog.