Product decisions are too important to be left to a vote
2024 has been dubbed the year of the election. Across 64 different countries about half the people in the world will have the opportunity to vote in national elections. From the UK to the USA, and from India to Indonesia, millions and millions of votes will be cast.
Voting is how democratic countries choose their politicians, but can it also be a good way to make product decisions? It’s certainly an approach that many product teams and product leaders have taken. For example, do you remember the time whenElon Musk asked Twitter (now called X) users if they wanted an edit button? Unsurprisingly it turns out that they did.
There are even dedicated customer feedback tools, such as UserVoice, Featurebase and Canny that allow users to vote for their favourite ideas and suggestions. Presumably the more votes an idea gets, the more likely it is to make it into a product.
Voting might be integral for making political decisions, but it’s not a good way to make product decisions. You see, when users vote, they are invariably voting for what is best for them at this very moment in time. They won’t vote for what is best for the product, or for wider users in general. They won’t factor in the product strategy, or the long-term goals for the product. They will think about their needs and only their needs.
Letting votes decide which features to build can be the path to a disjointed, fragmented, hotch-potch of a product. A product lacking a strategic compass. It can also lead to unrealistic user expectations, even dissatisfaction. Just as in politics, users expect their votes to count for something. If you tell them that they can vote for their favourite features, they will hope to see their favourite features make it into the product, certainly the features with the most votes. If this doesn’t happen, they can start to think that their votes perhaps didn’t count for something after all.
Rather than asking users to vote, product teams and product leaders should do what good politicians do. Canvas their users, understand what is best for them and then make considered decisions with the best interests of a product, and its users in mind.
Just as teams should take a data-informed, rather than data-driven approach, if they do insist on letting users vote, it should inform, not drive product decisions. Voting might be the bedrock of democracy; it should not be the bedrock of product development as well.
See also
- Data informed design, not data-driven design (UX for the Masses)
- Why the user is not always right (UX for the Masses)
- Why every design should start with a problem (UX for the Masses)
Image credits
Polling station photo by Elliott Stallion on Unsplash
VW car by form on PxHere
