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Be careful what you wish for. I've had the 'second coming of Jesus' email me, and an ungodly amount of abuse, also a lot of people who I think don't even know w

Be careful what you wish for. I've had the 'second coming of Jesus' email me, and an ungodly amount of abuse, also a lot of people who I think don't even know what a computer is, and lonely people who just want to talk. Talking with your customers lets you build relationships and brand loyalty which is valuable, but I'm also not sure if that outweighs the downsides. But for your situation just create a survey with Google forms or something and send it out to everyone. If you don't have many customers yet take the time to personalise each one. Since your product is a journal, maybe have a public forum/journal to build a community with as well?

b20000 4y ago
this. i also have had all of the above. once you talk to them and you are the developer of the software, be prepared for those users who will demand more features, that you fix bugs by tomorrow, that you do what they want, etc. i have had so much personal attacks and abuse i’ve stepped back and started bringing in other collaborators while i remain behind the scenes working on the software.
superasn 4y ago
This is so true. I too love to talk to users via smartsupp from time to time but just last time I was discussing meditation in Himalayas with a user after he asked where I was from. He was super a cool customer and really helped me improve the product too but you need to have a lot of patience and genuinely love talking to them with a mutual interest in them and then you can interview them to your hearts content. Also don't expect to get any dev done while you're doing this :)
nonrandomstring 4y ago
Some wisdom in this reply. When I read the OP question I took "difficult to talk with users" as being about the content of discussion/feedback not the mechanisms for soliciting it, so I'll stick with that take.... I'd say, you need to know what you want. You will definitely get extremes. I deal with feedback as a teacher, developer, author or musician, and many of the same things apply. Some will be straight, some over-nice, some funny and teasing, some will be rude and angry. But what you want is useful responses, regardless of emotional sentiment and how it's packaged. How do you filter for that? Like the guidelines of HN it's good to take the most sincere interpretation possible and look for attempts to communicate nuggets of useful critique. Someone who knocks your work down can be great, not even because they're right, but because they do so in a useful way, maybe by making you think about something. It's good to have a framework for identifying and interpreting things you're looking for. When I post on HN, because I am researching for a book, I have a kinda X-Keyscore selector set in mind - I'm looking for ethical/moral signals, nuggets that reveal underlying attitudes of hackers. But that could apply to any product or project and a set of information you're interested in seeking. A research method that can help you with this is thematic analysis and sentiment analysis. You "code" responses and score them as to how much they tell you about pre-selected areas you;re trying to improve... installation, usability, cost, configuration, interoperability.... and so on. Then, if you're going to respond, get back to those users on those specific points for clarification.

b20000 4y ago

this. i also have had all of the above. once you talk to them and you are the developer of the software, be prepared for those users who will demand more features, that you fix bugs by tomorrow, that you do what they want, etc. i have had so much personal attacks and abuse i’ve stepped back and started bringing in other collaborators while i remain behind the scenes working on the software.

superasn 4y ago

This is so true. I too love to talk to users via smartsupp from time to time but just last time I was discussing meditation in Himalayas with a user after he asked where I was from. He was super a cool customer and really helped me improve the product too but you need to have a lot of patience and genuinely love talking to them with a mutual interest in them and then you can interview them to your hearts content. Also don't expect to get any dev done while you're doing this :)

nonrandomstring 4y ago

Some wisdom in this reply. When I read the OP question I took "difficult to talk with users" as being about the content of discussion/feedback not the mechanisms for soliciting it, so I'll stick with that take.... I'd say, you need to know what you want. You will definitely get extremes. I deal with feedback as a teacher, developer, author or musician, and many of the same things apply. Some will be straight, some over-nice, some funny and teasing, some will be rude and angry. But what you want is useful responses, regardless of emotional sentiment and how it's packaged. How do you filter for that? Like the guidelines of HN it's good to take the most sincere interpretation possible and look for attempts to communicate nuggets of useful critique. Someone who knocks your work down can be great, not even because they're right, but because they do so in a useful way, maybe by making you think about something. It's good to have a framework for identifying and interpreting things you're looking for. When I post on HN, because I am researching for a book, I have a kinda X-Keyscore selector set in mind - I'm looking for ethical/moral signals, nuggets that reveal underlying attitudes of hackers. But that could apply to any product or project and a set of information you're interested in seeking. A research method that can help you with this is thematic analysis and sentiment analysis. You "code" responses and score them as to how much they tell you about pre-selected areas you;re trying to improve... installation, usability, cost, configuration, interoperability.... and so on. Then, if you're going to respond, get back to those users on those specific points for clarification.