6.6 Hear users

Subscribe to all online updates regarding your software. That way you can monitor problems, successes, what people love, what they hate and act upon them. Fixing it directly or helping with their problems is a good user experience by itself. There should be an official account for the software on the relevant platforms like Identi.ca, Diaspora and Twitter to be able to help or ask questions for clarification.

People will rant, praise, ask questions, post usage instructions for others or write a blog post describing how the software works. This is very insightful as outside perspectives on your project and how others perceive it to be.

I had the best results with the three searches of Identi.ca, Twitter and Google Blog. While you can view them as pages in the browser or search manually, you should subscribe to them in a news reader. Nextcloud News is a good free software, web-based feed reader I use for tracking Nextcloud news. These are the addresses for the different search sites where you need to replace »Nextcloud« with the name of your project:

Twitter search
Google blog search
identi.ca search 

At first it might seem like there is the problem of advanced users again. Are people who can use Identi.ca, Twitter and blogs really our target audience? Similar to what Benson, Müller-Prove & Mzourek (2004) say about mailing list participants. This is less of an issue here since the listed tools are much more common and easier to use than mailing lists.

When a problem or question occurs frequently, it needs to be documented and acted upon because it can be considered a severe usability issue.