Our customers are a great bunch…they come to us all the time with helpful feedback, praise, and feature requests. A common request might sound something like this:
I want to be able to click on the agents column to sort by agents.
Before we process that feedback, we need to consider the thought process that customer went through:
- I’m trying to do something.
- This is way #%*$ing harder than I think it ought to be.
- I think Paperless Pipeline should change X. Then I’d be able to do this thing easier.
Customers usually only tell us the last part, however. To come to an elegant solution that will work for our users, it’s important for us to dig into the feature request to learn more:
- Why do you think that would be useful?
- What are you trying to accomplish that would be made easier / faster / better with that change?
And once we fully understand their feedback, we start asking ourselves many more questions:
- Would this change benefit the vast majority of our users?
- Would this change make Paperless Pipeline more or less complicated?
- Is this change easy to understand and intuitive for new users?
- Will this change make our users happier?
After considering all these factors and more, we can decide the best way to solve their problem. It may end up being exactly as the customer had designed it or it may be a totally different solution altogether.