I belong to a strange department. We pride ourselves with a very thorough cycle of quality control and so we are convinced that our final product is flawless, unchallengeable and to be defended till death. So when our users spot issues here and there, instead of being gratuitous and improving on our product, we ask them to post their suggestions to www.trash.com. We are not interested in their suggestions to the product, we are only interested in how best they can make use of the product to do their job.
The root of the problem stems from the fact that the product is shown to the users only one week before its scheduled launch so there’s really no time to make changes whatsover. What needs to be done is for the product to be shown to the users one month in advance so that there is sufficient time to gather feedback and improve. It just doesn’t seem wise that the well intention and collective wisdom of so many good users are simply ignored. When the users’ suggestions get brushed aside once too often, they will end up switching off and choose not to say anything anymore. And yet our department wonders why the users are so quiet these days.
