The majority of collaborative conversations taking place in an enterprise mail world do not involve the customer. Words fail me. Well actually some words come to me. Words like "unbelievable" and "circle" and "jerk"
It's clear that the author has absolutely no training in user experience work. The first thing you learn is to ignore what the users say that they want, and instead focus on what they're doing, and figuring out what they actually want to accomplish. Involving users directly in product development is a recipe for disaster.
You should of course manage your user relations, be nice to them and talk to them and try to solve their problems, but to figure out in what direction you should develop your product, never ever ask your users directly. Instead, perform proper user research, analyze their work patterns, do split testing, optimize their workflow, gather data, data and more data.
The best counter-example is something that everyone who has ever launched a re-design of a popular website has experienced: For the first four weeks, the absolute majority of your users will complain that your website is different, and they will demand that you change it back to the way it was. After four weeks everyone will have forgotten what the old version looked like and stop complaining.
What the article author fails to realize is that the users that are interested in being part of the product development process are in no way representative of your actual userbase. There might be a precious few super-users that actually do and will come up with worthwhile suggestions, but the majority are not in this category and are best kept away from your business.
It's clear that the author has absolutely no training in user experience work. The first thing you learn is to ignore what the users say that they want, and instead focus on what they're doing, and figuring out what they actually want to accomplish. Involving users directly in product development is a recipe for disaster.
You should of course manage your user relations, be nice to them and talk to them and try to solve their problems, but to figure out in what direction you should develop your product, never ever ask your users directly. Instead, perform proper user research, analyze their work patterns, do split testing, optimize their workflow, gather data, data and more data.
The best counter-example is something that everyone who has ever launched a re-design of a popular website has experienced: For the first four weeks, the absolute majority of your users will complain that your website is different, and they will demand that you change it back to the way it was. After four weeks everyone will have forgotten what the old version looked like and stop complaining.
What the article author fails to realize is that the users that are interested in being part of the product development process are in no way representative of your actual userbase. There might be a precious few super-users that actually do and will come up with worthwhile suggestions, but the majority are not in this category and are best kept away from your business.