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5 reasons why interacting with your end users improves your code

One of the biggest mistakes that I can observe in any project is the inability of the development team to receive feedback from users. As a rule, developers miss one of the best sources of information that can make a significant contribution to creating an excellent solution. In this article, I’ll talk about 5 reasons why interacting with your end users can improve your code.



1) You know too much


Or at least you know too much about your decision. When you work on a project and understand how its individual parts or all the work are created, you lose the ability to be objective as to how simple or intuitive this particular function is. Interaction with end users allows you to get honest feedback on whether the function works exactly as it is intended.

2) Your users know what you (and your Product Owner) do not know


Your end users are experts in their field. They know what they need from the tools and how the process should work. Often there are things that can be missed when collecting the necessary information, this is especially true in large and complex applications. Constant interaction with end users throughout the development process can ensure that important functions are not missed.

3) Your users can help you identify errors (before they get into production)


One of the main advantages of getting feedback from users during development (in particular, through usability testing) is to find errors early on. Again, your users are experts in their work. Just contacting them with a request to fill out a form in your application can give you valuable information about problems with validation, invalid fields, erroneous display of radio buttons instead of checkboxes, and other problems that you may not find until the application will appear in their hands.

4) Your users know the most important thing


Today, continuous implementation is becoming more and more common. As a rule, development teams have a huge number of tasks that they need
to complete before moving on to the next stage of development. Communication with your users will allow you to understand where the pain points of your project are and what you need to focus the efforts of the development team.

5) Your users have great ideas!


Great ideas can come from anywhere, but, first of all, they can come from people who have already encountered a problem. Interacting with your users can help you take advantage of their great ideas and create better solutions.
There are many more things that any development team can learn from their users. The article provides only a few examples. If you want to get acquainted with an example of such interaction with users from real life, take a look at Microsoft Word UserVoice. There, users can offer ideas for improving the application, as well as vote for other ideas that they like, and, in turn, the development team can use this list to determine the priorities of their future work.

Interact with your end users. With them you will build better decisions than without them.

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