Why Website Owners Ignore What Customers Have To Say...

Earlier this week, I got what I perceived to be the strangest survey from Intuit. The survey was about their online backup service.

They asked me questions like, “Please rank which of these four features factor into your use of our backup service.” And then they named all these strange services that I didn’t even know they had, like disaster recovery, or fixing things up once your employee messes up your accounting data.

Finally, I wrote, “I use your service because my jump drives always broke or got too full.” Simple. Easy.

The problem we (like Intuit) often have is that we have super duper services and special features, and we think that our customers care about them, when in fact, our customers might not even know about them. (After all, we spent a year and a lot of money on that Super Duper feature, and now we want to write about it on our websites, no?)

All of which gets down to why qualitative data — surveys and user testing — are so important as we learn to create better websites.