[iosnoob]

Good to see real numbers in these sort of articles..

But let’s face it - users are never going to tell you what they need...or what you should build.

Shouldn’t they have spent more time building a great product first - before launching it? Those retention numbers to me say the product wasn’t working.

I doubt Apple asked any users for input when coming up with the iPhone.

[hkyeti]

Well we tried hard to build a great app, going through lots of mockups, user testing, research into how grandparents currently communicate with remote relatives etc.. and genuinely thought it could work based on the feedback.

Maybe there was never a product market fit in the first place, but the early feedback was that there was.

But maybe the product wasn't executed well and that's why it failed. Or there was an audience but it was far too niche.

That's the point, we just didn't even know why it failed.

We wouldn't use it to ask the users what to build necessarily (thought there are use cases for that) but more understanding why they DON'T like it...

even that would have given us a clear idea of what to change first and ignore the rest...

[JoeAltmaier]

Sometimes its as simple as getting lost the 1st time into the app - what button do I press next?

"Onboarding" is critical, and every single step not only Can lose customers but Will lose a certain percentage. Too many steps and your failure rate is compounded. Even losing 10% at each step means losing half after 6 steps.

In an app that requires at least 2 people to work (I work on one of those for a living), I'd guess that the 1st person tries it, finds nobody else online to interact with, and gives up instantly. We solve that by putting an Invite feature prominently in our onboard process. New users connect with someone almost immediately.

[vhew]

I disagree. I’m sure Apple had plenty of user input in the prototype and test phase.. I’m guessing they a big team of engineers building the thing who were the perfect target audience, and probably had lots more to try it too. The idea that you should build an awesome product in isolation and launch it perfectly seems like very bad advice...

[iosnoob]

We're meant to be the new product guys and come up with the new ideas, asking users to come up with new product suggestions is a recipe for a product that does a lot and not well.

In a past web forum I used to admin the users would ask for a million different things and if we implemented them all it would have been chaos.

At the end of the day someone has to have a creaive vision and see it executed, even if it only does one thing.. but does it really well..