How many times have you heard someone say this? If you’re a developer, probably a lot. I usually heard it when I was giving feedback on the design or UX of an app. It’s easy to dismiss the feedback of a developer. We’re weird people. Lots of us spend our time fighting to use computers like they did in the 1980s. Should that make our feedback any less valuable?

NO!

If you want to find the pain points of an app, ask the team developing it. The developers and testers use the app more than any other person on the planet. They know what parts of the app are slow and they know which parts of the app they’re afraid to use because they just don’t know how something will behave.

I’m not trying to say that developers are all UX experts. We’re not. I’m just trying to get people to stop immediately dismissing our feedback and really listen to what we’re saying. I’m also not saying that you shouldn’t get other people to look at your app. A fresh  set of eyes is absolutely crucial to making something usable.

So stop telling us we don’t know what we’re talking about. Stop telling us we’re so different. Listen to us.

If your managers or designers aren’t so enlightened, there are still ways to give good feedback. It’s all about context. Give your feedback from the point of view of your “regular” users. You should try and develop personas for your team. Personas are basically an abstract person that represents the different kinds of users of your app. It’s a GREAT way to have a common language for giving feedback. So instead of saying “I think this would be better because it solves this problem I have” say “Susan the soccer mom would learn this faster if something catered to her needs better.”

You go to log in and you forgot your password. Maybe you didn’t forget your password, maybe your username is wrong. Well crap, which is it? You hit the forgot password link. Now it’s asking for your email. Great, you got a password reset email. You still don’t know which username you used.

Why the hell did you need a username for this anyway? Wouldn’t an email suffice? “But I want to show off my individuality” you say. Ok, great, you can pick a display name or something after you sign up. It doesn’t have to be unique either. It’s not like your name in real life is unique.

By forcing you to pick a unique name, the service is adding one more barrier for you to sign up or making it that much harder to sign in if you ever forget your password.

Every service needs some unique way to identify users, but why should it be display name? My email address is already going to be unique (assuming most people don’t have enemies using their email addresses to sign up for stuff). I know that when I enter an email address and a password I’ll make it to step two. There is no hoping when I press the submit button.

I may not always want to be known by the decision I made when I signed up. I don’t want to use the AIM screen name I picked when I was in 7th grade. If I want to change it, I’ll have to tell every person on my buddy list about my new screen name and figure out some way to import everyone from my old account. (Maybe that problem has been solved? I never use AIM anymore). The only service I’ve seen handle this well is Twitter, and they still don’t solve the tricky signup problem.

As I get older, I find myself representing myself online as myself more and more. This is much harder to do when your username is required to be unique because there are a lot of people with my name. Next time you’re implementing a new web service remember this and ask yourself if you really need a unique username.