Last week, I complained about rejecting feedback out-of-hand because it’s not delivered in a way that you like reading.  A developer said that they ignored feedback that called their application “useless”, and that really bothered me.

Here are two pieces of feedback that are on the opposite ends of the spectrum:

• Your app is awesome!
• Your app is useless!

As a developer, I have an emotional reaction to both of them.  The first one gives a nice warm fuzzy.  The second one causes a scowl.  Neither of them tell me anything useful about my application.  It’s human nature to want to ignore the latter because it’s negative, but I have to ignore the former as well.  Ignore them not because the feedback has a message that I don’t want to hear, but because it doesn’t have a message at all.

The best kind of feedback helps you make decisions about how to proceed.  I would “never, ever, ever” tell someone that they shouldn’t say something when giving me feedback.  Instead, I tell them what they should do: they should be verbose.  I don’t care about loaded words.  What I care about is feedback that is loaded with details.

If you want me to consider making a change to my application, phrase it like an elevator pitch.  You’ve got to tell me why your request is something that I should consider.  Tell me why you want it and how you want to use it.  Tell me what you’re doing to work around not having it today.  Tell me how not having your request impacts your opinion of my application.

For example, I went looking through the VMware Community for the new vSphere Client for iPad.  In there, I found this feature request:

Since hosts can be seen, it would be a nice feature to enable vmotion/storage vmotions from the iPad client.

Let’s assume that adding such a feature is a non-trivial amount of development time.  If you want a significant development to be undertaken, you’ve got to justify it.  I can come up with a few different use cases where being able to kick off of a vMotion activity from your iPad would be nice, but I don’t know if any of these use cases are the ones that you have in mind.  Tell me why you want to do this, and tell me how it would make your life better if you were able to do this with our spiffy new iPad client.  Tell me how important it is to you: would it be “nice to have”, or is it “useless” without it?

Adding in details doesn’t guarantee that your request will be met, but it gives me a lot more information to use as I make decisions about my application going forward.