Here's what I've found as effective ways to give (and receive) negative feedback. 1. TRUST - I'm part of a tight-knit group of bootstrapper/indie devs and a re

Here's what I've found as effective ways to give (and receive) negative feedback. 1. TRUST - I'm part of a tight-knit group of bootstrapper/indie devs and a real aspect of how we're able to offer real feedback is that we have the backdrop of knowing each other in other ways. If someone who I consider a fantastic developer and sent me a Christmas card last year tells me: "Mike, this makes no sense." take that a lot more seriously. 2. DATA - as a human I've found that I'm often wrong, so I try to evaluate my own opinions against data. In the context of apps/sites this is often A/B tests or other quantifiable things. 3. FEEDBACK NOT ACTION - People tend to offer feedback along with a kneejerk suggestion on what action to take to resolve it. Example: I had a service that required users to OAuth (with a bunch of legitimately scary permission scopes) and also make DNS changes to enable it and was told repeatedly as feedback that it was "too much" and "people would never use it". Their recommendation: shut it down. The direction I took: go crazy building trust in the process. The result: my most successful project to date with thousands of paying customers. 3. SCOPE - feedback is often scoped improperly. Is someone asking for feedback about a startup idea: "Will this connect with people?" it's not useful to critique the fonts used on their homepage or something else. (both HN and I are too often guilty of this). 4. BELIEVE FEEDBACK - one of the most important exercises I do for all my projects now is a "UX walk through" where I sit someone down and just try and let them sign up and work through the process of signing up for the service with as little intervention from myself as possible. I find it incredibly painful. Even interfaces that I think are incredibly polished and straightforward suddenly become opaque nightmares when presented to people that haven't seen them before. This is the "curse of knowledge" - I'm too close to the process and can't see the issues clearly. In these situations, it's incredibly easy to argue with people about it and say: "how can you not have seen that button?" or "You're not really paying attention" or something else dumb. But if I'm able to make myself believe the feedback, not take it personally and really address the issues at hand I find I get fantastic results. Last time I did this I ended up scrapping months of works (painful), migrating to a new auth system (painful) and rebuilding the entire onboarding from scratch (incredibly painful), but the end result was a move from 30% successful user onboarding to over 70%. Feedback works.