A friend of mine just asked me for some good examples of companies involving their users directly in product development. I have tons of examples of this, I’m sure – I talk about it often – but nothing seems to come to mind (maybe because it’s saturday and I’m sitting in the sun with a cup of coffee listening to music).
Right now I can only think of a couple of examples:
Dell Ideastorm. Dell asked users to come up with ideas for products and then rate and comment on each other’s ideas.
Jaiku, the Finnish start-up that I’ve been raving about for weeks now. My experience with Jaiku is that these guys take input from their users very serious – and seemingly initiate changes based on it.
Ordbogen.com is an online dictionary, that goes about involving users in a more subtle fashion. Whenever someone searches for a word that isn’t already in the dictionary, that word is added to a list, and if searced for a significant amount of times – added to the dictionary.
I’m sure there are tons of other cases – can anyone help me help my friend? Drop me a link and a line if you know of a good case of ‘product development 2.0′.
Tweet
3 Comments
I am involved in a Danish project where the users involved are the citizens of a region (in Jytland). They are invited to join in with their ideas for regional development (the project is also an IRL project where 25 women are housing ap. 100 meetings in their local areas to get the conversations going). The project is called Anna Amalia (after a german dutches who hosted salons in Weimar 200 years ago)
More (in Danish) here: http://www.annaamalia.dk
Dell IdeaStorm is well-intentioned, but already proving to have been ill-conceived. Just putting a big suggestion box on the web (even with the voting aspect) is not going to result in innovation. I’ve written more about this here: http://www.userdriven.org/blog/2007/3/2/ideadrizzle.html
As has Paul Young at Product Beautiful: http://www.productbeautiful.com/2007/02/26/dell-outsourcing-product-management-to-its-customers/
One company that’s done it sensibly is Staples. They asked a properly narrow question (how to categorize products in their store) and asked people individually rather than in an open forum. I’ve written about this, too, here: http://www.userdriven.org/blog/2006/5/14/eating-my-own-dog-food.html
Thanks for the comments, guys.
@Trine-Maria – this was just the kinda site I was looking for. I’ve looked at it before, but had forgotten about it again (probably seeing as I live as far away from ‘Region Midtjylland’ as I do.
@Bruce – Good points. When I wrote my post I considered going into a debate on HOW openly and unstructured you should really involve customers, but I decided to tackle that issue later – thanks to your comment and links, I won’t have to