Stop asking users what features they want you to create next

In our year we sent quarterly feedback surveys asking our user base what tools they wanted us to add. We ended up building an analytics dashboard because a dozen vocal customers asked for it.

After spending three weeks building the feature only two of those users opened it more than once. We learned the way that users are great at explaining their daily problems but not so good, at coming up with software solutions.

We changed our feedback process to focus entirely on their workflow instead of looking at feature wishlists. Now we ask them to explain the tedious part of their week or the task that takes them the longest to finish.

This small change gave us an understanding of their real problems. We recently built a CSV export function based on workflow feedback and it became our most used release.

How do you tell real user needs from feature requests?